Introduction

In this review we’re taking an in-depth look at the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming OC, which represents the company’s value-ended custom-design of NVIDIA’s new flagship GPU. The Gaming OC and WindForce brands stood on their own under the Gigabyte marquee, as the company positioned the higher AORUS Gaming range with its various tiers at the top of their product stack. With the RTX 4090, Gigabyte is only designing AORUS Xtreme and AORUS Master tiers (and no lower-end AORUS Elite), which creates room in the company’s product stack for the Gaming OC we have here. Don’t confuse value for cheap, this is still designed to be a formidable custom-design, with all the bells and whistles enthusiasts and gamers would want. The GeForce RTX 4090 is the absolute best RTX 40-series graphics card you can have (and the only SKU from the series at the time of this review).

At the heart of the RTX 4090 is the new “Ada Lovelace” graphics architecture, which debuts the 3rd generation of NVIDIA RTX, the company’s pioneering attempt at adding realism to game visuals, by blending conventional raster 3D graphics with real-time ray traced elements such as lighting, shadows, reflections, illumination, motion-blur, etc., all of which are as close to real-life as possible, thanks to the power of ray tracing. Ada debuts new 3rd generation RT cores that accelerate ray tracing; and 4th generation Tensor cores that do AI; combined with a lot more CUDA cores than the previous generation, running at much higher clock speeds, with much more on-die cache to cushion the memory sub-system.

For Ada, NVIDIA leveraged the 4 nm EUV silicon fabrication process, and achieved three times the transistor-counts over the previous-generation, at comparable GPU die-area and typical board power of 450 W (similar to that of the RTX 3090 Ti). In return the company is promising the kind of performance uplifts we’re used to seeing back when Moore’s Law still worked for GPUs—about 50 to 100 percent generational performance uplifts. Besides these, the company also introduced a major update to its popular performance enhancement, DLSS 3, which can now generate entire frames in videos or games, without involving the graphics rendering pipeline of the GPU; thereby doubling frame-rates when enabled.

The RTX 4090 is based on the 4 nm “AD102” silicon, which it doesn’t quite max-out, but is still spec’d fairly high. It comes with 16,384 CUDA cores (out of 18.432 present on the silicon); 128 RT cores, 512 Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The memory sub-system is generationally unchanged—24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface; although NVIDIA has significantly increased the on-die caches. The RTX 4090 comes with 72 MB of L2 cache, compared to just 6 MB on the RTX 3090.

The Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC doesn’t look spartan in design despite being the company’s value-ended custom-design product. The RGB-illuminated fan intake actually suggests Gigabyte decided in the last minute not to name this an AORUS Elite product, and went with Gaming OC. You get a meaty 4-slot cooling solution with plenty of surface-area for heat-dissipation, and a triple-fan setup. Besides the fan intakes, RGB graces the Gigabyte logo on the card, and you get a sturdy metal backplate. There’s also a tiny GPU Boost factory-overclock of 2535 MHz vs. 2525 MHz reference. Handy features such as dual-BIOS, power-status indicators, and a segment-best 4-year product warranty are also present. Gigabyte is pricing this card at $1,700, or a $100 premium over the NVIDIA baseline.