NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

Nvidia’s nomenclature generally includes an entry-level 50-series GPU, a budget 60-series GPU, a performance 70-series GPU, an enthusiast 80-series, and an alpha Titan GPU. This nomenclature has been in place for over five years at this point. But, with the launch of Ampere GPUs, Nvidia changed its rules. There is no Titan GPU anymore. Instead, the alpha GPU has been renamed to a 90-series GPU. This renames the latest alpha GPU to RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 is over 30% faster than the last-gen Titan RTX. It is a huge chungus, and Nvidia aptly calls it a Big Ferocious Graphics Processing Unit (BFGPU). The card is so capable that it can play games at 8K (7,680 x 4,320 pixels) resolutions. 8K is four times as sharp as 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) on a similarly sized display.

The RTX 3090 was released on September 1, 2020. It was available in retail stores from September 24, 2020. It is based on the same Ampere architecture as other RTX 30 Series GPUs. Thus, it comes with 2nd generation RT cores, 3rd generation Tensor cores, and new Streaming Multiprocessors. Nvidia states their new Streaming Multiprocessors are capable of twice Single-precision Floating-Point Format (FP32) performance. The second-generation RT cores are significantly better than their predecessors in AI and Ray Tracing performance.

The RTX 3090 is based on Nvidia’s GA-102 GPU, which is also found in the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti GPUs. It is based on Samsung’s 8nm process with a die size of 628 mm². The RTX 3090 comes with support for all top-of-the-line features, along with packing a ridiculous 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. Although those numbers are the same as the last-gen Turing Titan RTX, the upgrade from GDDR6 to GDDR6X makes all the difference. The 24GB of memory is based on a 384-bit memory bus and is capable of bandwidth of up to 936.2 GB/s.

The RTX 3090 Founders Edition (FE), or the reference card is a big black piece of technology. Its original dimensions were 336mm x 140mm x 61mm. However, subsequent revisions have brought the numbers down to 313mm x 138mm x 55mm. It still is an absolute chungus weighing 4.84 pounds. In comparison, a roasted chicken weighs somewhere between 5 and 7 pounds. It is even taller than an Xbox Series X. It will take up 3 PCIe slots, so it is not a joke.

Just like its dimensions, the RTX 3090 is an extreme power hog. Although the rated TDP is 350W, the power draw in the reference card exceeds 400W at several workload instances.

The RTX 3090 packs a whooping 10,496 shading units. To back that, we have 328 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 112 Render Output Units (ROPs), 82 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), 328 Tensor cores, and 82 RT cores. It has 128KB of L1 cache per Streaming Multiprocessor and a total of 6MB of L2 cache. All of this hardware output 189.9 GPixel/s pixel rate, 556.0 GTexel/s texture rate, 35.58 TFlops of FP32 (float) performance, and 556.0 GFlops FP64 (Double) performance. That makes the RTX 3090 almost 30% faster than the last-gen Titan RTX.

When it comes to real-world benchmarks, the RTX 3090 scores 19,970 in 3DMark Time Spy median result. It is almost near to the 19,573 scored by the RTX 3080 Ti and the 19,167 scored by the RX 6900 XT. The RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3090 are almost similar in terms of their specs. They are based on the same GPU, and Nvidia used the same cooling design for it. The only big differences are the 400$ lesser price tag and 12 lesser VRAM modules. Thus, the almost-similar scores are justifiable. However, the RX 6900 XT is a direct competitor from Team Red to the RTX 3090. It is more aggressively priced, at just $999. This makes the RX 6900 XT the best value-for-money card in the leaderboards today.

I will never recommend an RTX 3090 to someone who just wants to game. It is not meant for gaming, no matter how much Nvidia showcases its gaming prowess. An RTX 3080 is enough for gaming. It can play every major title at 4K. The RTX 3080 Ti is the ultimate gear you are looking for. An RTX 3090 will be a waste of money if you just game. The RTX 3090 is the best card for creators and game developers, although there are better options like the RTX A5000 and the RTX A6000. However, the RTX 3090 might be the cheapest gear professionals can arm their render rig with. It performs like a charm.

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