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While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's only 3% faster than the next closest RX 7900 XTX at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 8% at 1440p and then 23% at 4K. Against the RTX 3090 Ti, it's also a major upgrade: 14% faster at 1080p, 27% faster at 1440p, and 51% faster at 4K.
For the high-end gamer, you've plenty of new cards to choose from. Nvidia has its RTX 40-series led by the RTX 4090, and that thing really is a beast of massive proportions. No seriously, it's huge. Then there's the RTX 4080, which is a bit too pricey for us, and the RTX 4070 Ti. The RTX 4070 Ti also costs a heap more cash than we'd like, but at least it's more reasonable than Nvidia's finest for a perfectly 4K capable card. Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT lands a few percent behind the RX 6600 XT. Yet as an RTX 4080 competitor the RX 7900 XTX is less convincing. It's rarely able to match the RTX 4080. The RTX 4080 is up to 28% faster in my testing, though it's more like 15% on average. For an RTX card that asks at least 20% more cash than the RX 7900 XTX, that stat is not a dealbreaker, but it does make the XTX's gains more moderate by comparison. What helps the XTX's value proposition is that it has more memory and, on rare occasions, actually beats the RTX 4080. If you're only playing Far Cry 6 then you're laughing with an XTX, but let's be honest, you're not. The older GTX prefix is now used to denote older Nvidia graphics cards which don't have the extra AI and ray tracing silicon that the RTX-level cards do. This RTX prefix was introduced with the RTX 20-series, and highlights which cards have GPUs which sport both the Tensor Cores and RT Cores necessary for real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).There's no denying it is an ultra-niche ultra-enthusiast card, and that almost makes the RTX 4090 little more than a reference point for most of us PC gamers. We're then left counting the days until Ada descends to the pricing realm of us mere mortals, which is still yet to happen despite the launch of the RTX 4070 Ti. With a price tag closer to the GeForce RTX 3070, yet performance between it and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, most often closer to the latter, the Radeon was a solid alternative but hadn't been my first port of call for this sort of cash for a good portion of its life. That's all changed now that it's often quite a reasonable amount cheaper than the RTX 3060 Ti or anything the newer generation can manage. And with the extra genuine performance of the upscaled frames and the interpolated smoothness of the AI-generated frames, the performance improvement is spectacular where DLSS 3 is available. Which should be more and more often, with Nvidia's Streamline SDK offering devs a one-stop option for enabling it and other vendors' upscaling tech too.
Except for Intel's Arc GPUs. We haven't included them in this graph as the A770 and A750 3DMark results skew higher than their actual gaming performance and would be misleading. The two Intel GPUs generally post frame rate numbers that put them around either the RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti at a pinch. Graphics card MSRP list
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The RTX prefix is only used to denote cards which house Nvidia GPUs with dedicated ray tracing hardware, but AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs also support real-time ray tracing acceleration.
It's been designed to beat an RTX 3060 Ti by as tight a performance margin as possible—and you honestly can't argue with the business reasons for doing so—but without DLSS 3 and Frame Generation it certainly doesn't feel like a particularly exciting generational upgrade over the old Ampere card. DLSS 2 upscaling with quality mode is supported in most ray tracing games and can boost performance an additional 30~50 percent (depending on the game, resolution, and settings used). FSR 2 and XeSS support can provide a similar uplift, but FSR 2 is only in about a third as many games right now, and XeSS support is even less common.
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Following the release ofAMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTandRX 7900 XTX, you might have expected AMD to follow a traditional release cadence and produce an RX 7800 or RX 7700-series card next. Not this time around. Surprisingly, it was the RX 7600 that appeared on shelves next. The RTX 4060 is a very power efficient GPU, too. It's well suited to gamers with smaller cases or cases with poor airflow as it doesn't dump a lot of heat. AMD continues to relegate DXR and ray tracing to secondary status, focusing more on improving rasterization performance — and on reducing manufacturing costs through the use of chiplets on the new RDNA 3 GPUs. As such, the ray tracing performance from AMD isn't particularly impressive. The new RX 7900 XTX basically matches Nvidia's previous generation RTX 3080 Ti, which puts it just a bit behind the RTX 3090 — and Nvidia's 4070 Ti outpaces it by 7–9 percent on average across our test suite. The step down RX 7900 XT meanwhile lands around the level of the RTX 4070. There are some minor improvements for RT performance in RDNA 3, though, as the 7800 XT for example ends up basically tied with the RX 6800 XT in rasterization performance but is 10% faster in DXR performance. Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 along with the Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless. RTX 4080 again ranks as the most efficient GPU, followed by the RTX 4090, RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4060 Ti, and RTX 4060. Even the RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 rank ahead of AMD's best, which again is the RX 7900 XT. Intel's Arc GPUs are still pretty far down the efficiency list, though in DXR they're often better than AMD's RX 6000-series parts.
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