A little bit of humor to start this article by referring to the famous René Magritte’s painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. Indeed, we didn’t have the chance to get our hands on a copy of the new NVIDIA RTX 4090 Founders Edition and so we have to be satisfied with a photograph. However, we have chosen to present it to you from the photos at our disposal. But don’t panic, we’ll be here tomorrow at 3pm to show you our copy of the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X. We would like to take this opportunity to thank MSI for making this unique sample available to us! 
We are going to talk to you today about this NVIDIA RTX 4090 Founders Edition as well as the new features that revolve around this new architecture “ADA Lovelace” from NVIDIA. [nextpage title=”NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE: “]
The :
As a reminder, the cards of the ” Founders Edition ” series are unique models offered by NVIDIA. The main advantage of these cards is to be proposed at a “locked” price that will not change in the weeks or months to come. It will be available this October 12 at a price of $1 599. NVIDIA’s partners will also offer their own model, but at a higher price, since few of them manage to match the Founders Edition price. Visually, NVIDIA has kept a very similar design to the RTX 3090 Ti FE as well as its thickness of 3 slots.
As usual, NVIDIA has taken particular care with the packaging of its card by offering a cardboard box where the RTX 4090 FE is hidden. In the bundle, we find a 16-pin (12+4) to four 8-pin 150w adapter (600w in total). This adapter is necessary for those who do not have a power supply with a 16-pin port. Please note that NVIDIA is the only supplier of the adapter and therefore provides it to its partners. We have also received the 16-pin connector from Corsair, which is compatible with the high-end models of the brand such as the H1500i but also the AX1600i.
The NVIDIA RTX 4090 Founders Edition benefits from NVIDIA’s brand new architecture, namely “ADA Lovelace”. It replaces the Ampere architecture of the GeForce RTX 30xx launched a little over two years ago.
This flagship model of NVIDIA has a GPU AD102-300 with 16384 CUDA cores or 5632 cores more than the RTX 3090 Ti. It is equipped with a manufacturing process in 4nm from TSMC, not the 8 nm manufacturing process made by Samsung which allows to lower the TGP to 450 watts and not to 600 watts as we thought for several weeks. This change of engraving has had an impact on the size of the heat sinks as we discuss in this brief. The Boost frequency is also very different as it is 2520 MHz versus 1860 MHz on the RTX 3090 Ti FE.
In terms of memory, there are 24 GB of GDDR6X memory in 384-bit, which translates into a bandwidth of 1008 GB/s or 1 TB/s. The speed of this RTX 4090 should be 2 to 4 times faster than the RTX 3090 Ti according to NVIDIA. On the next page, we will come back in details on the new features brought by this new architecture, including the support of DLSS 3.
Cooling:
NVIDIA has kept the proven cooling principle of the previous generation. However, there is a difference in that the two fans are now 120 mm models with 7 blades that increase the airflow by 20%.
The goal is, as with any cooling system, to keep the GPU cool while producing acceptable noise levels. So NVIDIA had the idea to use two fans but placed on both sides of the graphics card. The one on the left sucks air from inside the case and is then expelled from the back of the card. The other fan, located on the right, also draws air from your case to dissipate the heat from the vapor chamber before being expelled in the upper position, still within your case. Needless to say, you’ll need to opt for good air circulation within your case if you want to keep your components cool.
The power stage consists of 23 phases and 12 2 GB GDDR6X memory chips. The RTX 4090 uses a PCIz 4.0 x16 interface but its power architecture is compliant with PCIe Gen 5 specifications. Finally, there is no RGB backlighting but just the GeForce RTX logo on the top edge that lights up in white. [nextpage title=”New technological innovations: “] A new generation automatically means a lot of new technological innovations and this RTX 4090 is no exception to the rule. We will try to quote you the most important ones in this page a little more theoretical. Most of this information comes from documents received by NVIDIA and which were under NDA until today.
New Ada Lovelace architecture:
On September 21 at 5pm, NVIDIA unveiled part of its future range of graphics cards architected around “ADA Lovelace”. Technically, this chip is out of the ordinary with its 76 billion transistors, its N4 engraving by TSMC, its Shader Execution Reordering, its 90 TFLOPS, its 200 RT TFLOPS, its 1400 Tensor TFLOPS and a maximum of 18432 CUDA Cores in a single GPU. This is quite impressive compared to the previous generation Ampere.
The chip is organized into 12 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC) each containing 72 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) with 144 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM). The Streaming Multiprocessors benefit from a new technology called Shader Execution Reordering (SER) which allows to multiply by two the Ray Tracing operations. We can also notice that the chip of the RTX 4090 is amputated allowing perhaps to see a future RTX 4090 Ti land.
This new RTX 4090 also comes with 4th generation Tensor Cores, which will be very useful for the DLSS and DLSS 3 AI as well as 3rd generation RT Cores which will allow to double the performance of Ray Tracing. In addition to the generation evolution, their number also increases compared to the RTX 3090 Ti.
By the way, here is a comparison table to judge the differences between these two cards.
DLSS 3 lands and is already operational:
One of the announcements of NVIDIA during its conference is the arrival of DLSS 3. However, this one is only compatible with RTX 4090’s. Owners of a previous generation card will have to rely on DLSS 2 which NVIDIA will continue to develop in the coming months.
As a reminder, until now, the principle of DLSS (Deep learning super sampling) was to allow a gain in terms of FPS by replacing the antialiasing TAA. The idea is to calculate the rendering in a lower definition than that chosen in the parameters and then to replay it in the definition said using an AI applied via the Tensor Core while maintaining the most perfect image quality possible.
Today, with the arrival of DLSS 3, things are changing even if the fundamental principle of increasing the number of FPS is still the main reason. The novelty comes from the fact that DLSS 3 allows you to add whole intermediate images and no longer pixels. This increases the number of frames per second and consequently the fluidity. To achieve this, DLSS3 uses an optical flow gas pedal integrated into the new RTX 4000 architecture. For this reason, previous generations that are not equipped with DLSS3 will not be able to benefit from it. We will have to be careful during our tests and compare what is comparable because yes, of course the DLSS 3 will be more powerful but it is difficult to judge it on the Ampere generation which does not support it.
Even if the main function is to increase the number of FPS, NVIDIA also reminds the importance of latency. We had already dealt with this subject in this article by talking about Reflex. To summarize simply, the principle is to reduce the latency in games as much as possible, that is to say the time that elapses between the moment you click on the button of your mouse and its manifestation on the screen. In order to be able to perform all the readings, a compatible mouse will be necessary.
The latest advances from NVIDIA could turn the world of e-sports upside down, as we could see 1440p 27″ displays replacing the current 1080p 25″ displays. Finally, NVIDIA has already announced over 35 games that are compatible and ready to use DLSS 3. We will of course add games that support DLSS 3 to our tests. Of course DLSS 3 games are backwards compatible with DLSS 2 technology.
AV1 hardware compression:
NVIDIA now integrates its 8th generation NVENC encoder with AV1 which is 40% more efficient than H.264. The arrival of AV1 will be very useful especially for streaming. We’ll see you later today to discover our complete test of the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X.