Nvidia’s RTX 4090 graphics card, the flagship of the Lovelace generation, witnessed its first leaked benchmark that sparked an interesting array of responses.
The 3DMark result provided by well-known leaker Kopite7kimi on Twitter shows the supposed performance (keep the salt shaker handy) of the RTX 4090 in the Time Spy Extreme test.
As you can see, the next-gen flagship GPU achieves a graphics score of just over 19,000 in the benchmark. What does that mean? Well, in general, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from recent rumors, although there are some people who are disappointed with the outcome on Twitter (and elsewhere).
We’ll discuss exactly why this might be the case next, and what we think the score indicates, keeping in mind that this is just a single synthetic benchmark – and one that was leaked early on – so it’s a very narrow perspective on the potential. of the RTX 4090.
Analysis: Dangers of believing the rumor hype
That 19,000 count compares to the base RTX 3090 (Founders Edition) scoring 9,955 when we compared the latter on the Time Spy Extreme during our review. So a little simple math shows that the RTX 4090 appears to be about 90% faster than the RTX 3090 (possibly a little more, as Kopite7kimi indicates the score could be a little over 19,000).
More recently, in the rumor mill, we’ve widely heard the prediction that the RTX 4090 will be twice as fast as its flagship predecessor. The problem with some of the small disappointments with the reveal of this leaked benchmark revolves around that expectation, and more precisely, part of the hope fed earlier in the rumor cycle that the RTX 4090 might even offer a more 2-like performance leap, 5x more or less.
Those never seemed like realistic expectations to us, and nearly doubling the performance is a huge leap, let’s not forget. In fact, a 90% increase for rasterization (non-ray tracing) compared to the RTX 3090 is actually a huge step forward – if we put that in perspective compared to the RTX 2080 Ti leap that the RTX 3090 itself made, this it was a 42% increase.
So this is indeed a very impressive feat – if the leak is accurate – and keep in mind though that we can still see better performance from the finished RTX 4090 (with final drivers and so on). Although the actual test for Lovelace’s flagship is with real gaming benchmarks, not synthetics of course – although the latter are still a useful indicator of respective performance levels.
Other rumors surrounding the RTX 4090 remain the same, namely that it will be the first Lovelace GPU to launch for Nvidia – possibly in October – and that the GPU will draw 450W or more, which isn’t a real surprise given the performance boost. Clock speeds are expected to be up to 2.5GHz or maybe even a little higher, up to the 2.7GHz mark or even up to 2.8GHz (certainly with third-party cards that feature advanced cooling solutions) .
We’re talking about traditional raster performance here, of course, and the ray tracing increases could be even more substantial – in fact, rumor has it that they will be. In short, the RTX 4090 is configured to be quite a graphics card, likely with a pretty steep price tag fixed on it too – particularly if Nvidia still needs to help clean up the high-end RTX 3000 stockpile after the Lovelace flagship launch.