Despite being a general-purpose card, the RTX 4090 is quite a piece of work and quite versatile above all. Indeed, after compiling the results of various tests conducted by Pudgets Systems it turns out that the little GeForce does better than its pro counterpart. This is a big blow for NVIDIA, especially if you compare the price of the two solutions: $1599 vs $6800!
A little reminder of the two monsters!
In one case as in the other, we find two imposing cards equipped with a large graphics chip.
For its part, the 4090 has a GPU AD102 containing 16384 cuda core, 512 TMU, 176 ROP, 512 Tensor Core and 128 RT Core. Clocked at 2529 MHz in boost, this card shows a performance of 82.58 TFLOP in FP32. And at the memory level, we have 24 GB of GDDR6X clocked at 21 Gbps on a 384-bit bus. The memory bandwidth then shows 1008 GB/s.
As for the RTX 6000 Ada, we find a card equipped with a nearly complete AD102 chip. It has 18176 cuda core, 568 TMU, 192 ROP, 568 Tensor core and 142 RT Core. Nevertheless, it is less fast: 2505 MHz in boost and displays a more limited TDP: 300W against 450W… This does not prevent it from displaying FP32 performance of 91.06 TFLOP. Finally, on the memory side, we have 48 GB of GDDR6 clocked at 20 Gbps offering a lower bandwidth of 960 GB/s.
The RTX 4090 faster than its pro rival at $6800!
Of course, the compilation includes results obtained with the same versions of the test software. Also, the configuration between the different series is the same: a Threadripper PRO 5975WX backed by 128GB of DDR4-3200 ECC memory. On the cooling side, we have a Noctua NH-U12S TR4-SP3.
Finally, after compiling the results of several different test series, it turns out that the RTX 4090 is the faster of the two… And not just a little. Our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware mention differences ranging from 3% to 25%, which is pretty huge. It’s even bigger when you consider that the RTX 6000 Ada generation is fully dedicated to this content creation activity. For example, the GeForce is faster on Adobe Premiere Pro, Unreal Engine, V-Ray, Octane Render and Blender.
The bottom line is that if you were planning to buy a new graphics card for rendering, the most expensive card may not be the best choice. Of course, this will depend on the software used and the optimization of the drivers… Although on the five software mentioned above, there is no doubt about it!
