Unless you have been living under a rock, and that rock has no internet access, you will know that NVIDIA recently made a relatively big impact with the introduction of their flagship RTX 4090 graphics card. Anyone building or buying a high-end gaming PC will know that the card has been in high demand and has had spells of being out of stock at major retailers in many countries, but restocks have been forthcoming. The company also put the word out about the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4080 12GB, however, the latter was "unlaunched" due to backlash about expected performance (and comedic price vs performance). Compared to previous generations, the RTX 4080 didn't stand a chance in hell getting past PC enthusiasts, and the swift backtracking/unlaunch began in earnest by Team Green. The RTX 4080 12GB was later officially released and renamed as the RTX 4070 Ti.
Quick recap
Before we get to the benchmarks, it might be handy to get a quick recap on the line-ups that was announced, and architecture we're playing with in the 40-Series.
Missing Desktop GPUs from the RTX 40-Series
Currently, the desktop GPU line-up is missing the RTX 4070, RTX 4060, and RTX 4050. It is expected that NVIDIA may release some or all of these cards throughout the year. Expectations are high for budget and mid-tier cards, which will come in the form of the 4050 and 4060 respectively.
Architecture
NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace graphics cards are built using TSMC's N4 manufacturing process, which is a 4nm process node. This is a smaller process than the last-gen Ampere cards, which were built on an 8nm node. Although not all of these GPUs have been released yet, as far as we know in this 40-Series generation, the GPU dies range from the AD102 (flagship) to the AD106 (budget).
The smaller manufacturing process of the N4 allows NVIDIA to fit more cores on the same GPU die, and the AD102 GPU in its fully unlocked state has an impressive 18,432 CUDA cores. This is a significant increase compared to the last-gen RTX 3090 Ti, which had only 10,752 cores. It is important to note that NVIDIA has not yet released the full AD102 GPU.
Performance
Currently, the RTX 4090 is the best graphics card in NVIDIA's line-up, and the highest performer overall against any other consumer GPU right now. The RTX 4090 GPU makes the most of the 4nm node and boosts the clock speed up to 2.52GHz. However, it does not feature the full-fledged AD102 die. This suggests that at some point, NVIDIA may release an RTX 4090 Ti or even resurrect and reintroduce us to a musclebound RTX Titan which will utilise the full AD102 GPU.
The RTX 4090 is already extremely powerful, showing a significant increase in performance over the RTX 3090 Ti, and AMD's RDNA 3 opponents - the RX 7900 XTX - which still struggles with stock levels after launching December 13th 2022.
Tensor Cores and Ray Tracing cores are still featured in the line-up, with NVIDIA making them better than ever before. The RTX 40-series features fourth-gen Tensor cores and third-gen Ray Tracing (RT) cores. The new RT cores give NVIDIA an even bigger lead over AMD in terms of Ray Tracing capabilities, beating their 7000-Series in terms of Ray Tracing, synthetic benchmarks and lacking DLSS/FSR performance. The RTX 4090 has been shown to maintain real-time Ray Tracing at high resolutions, with only a few titles giving AMD any points on the scoreboard.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 4080 vs RTX 4070Ti
On with the show, then, and it's time for some actual gaming benchmarks.
We have two Intel processors in these benchmarks, and both test rigs had 32GB DDR4 or DDR5 RAM for testing purposes, with games stored on fast SSD.
- Test Rig A - Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4
- Test Rig B - Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5
Ray Tracing: Off
| Cyberpunk 2077 | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 100 FPS | 68 FPS | 148 FPS | 71 FPS | 146 FPS | 90 FPS |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 107 FPS | 50 FPS | 129 FPS | 65 FPS | 170 FPS | 84 FPS |
| Assassins Creed Valhalla | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 114 FPS | 78 FPS | 135 FPS | 96 FPS | 157 FPS | 118 FPS |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 115 FPS | 71 FPS | 139 FPS | 89 FPS | 160 FPS | 109 FPS |
| God of War | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 108 FPS | 76 FPS | 133 FPS | 96 FPS | 174 FPS | 123 FPS |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 124 FPS | 76 FPS | 154 FPS | 97 FPS | 195 FPS | 129 FPS |
| Resident Evil Village | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 172 FPS (RT) | 118 FPS (RT) | 219 FPS (RT) | 157 FPS (RT) | 241 FPS (RT) | 212 FPS (RT) |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 231 FPS | 121 FPS | 282 FPS | 158 FPS | 313 FPS | 221 FPS |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 105 FPS | 65 FPS | 132 FPS | 82 FPS | 158 FPS | 110 FPS |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 119 FPS | 73 FPS | 149 FPS | 94 FPS | 182 FPS | 123 FPS |
| Spider-Man Remastered | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4080 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4070 Ti |
| Test Rig | Resolution: | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K | 1440p | 4K |
| Intel i9-12900K, 32GB DDR4 | 133 FPS | 90 FPS | 134 FPS | 107 FPS | 144 FPS | 128 FPS |
| Intel i9 13900K, 32GB DDR5 | 149 FPS | 87 FPS | 179 FPS | 108 FPS | 212 FPS | 143 FPS |
Benchmark Summary
The RTX 4070 Ti has many attributes when we look at the above benchmarks. At 1440p, the card can hit triple figures in all of the titles, and never drops below the sweet spot of 60 FPS in 4K. This is one of the reasons we have been recommending the RTX 4070 Ti in our recent comparison articles.
That said, to knock the framerate out of the park, the RTX 4080 represents amazing value just sitting under the RTX 4090 in many games, with as little as 2 FPS difference for some titles. The gap widens once we start taking Ray Tracing into consideration, but with the advent of DLSS 3, you would be hard pressed not to have an amazing experience in 1080, 1440p and 4K with the RTX 4080.
The Core i9 12th-Generation Alder Lake processor is a stunning CPU, and puts up an amazing performance against the 13th-Gen Raptor Lake. Even with DDR5 in the build, you will see very tight margins here.
Which GPU should I buy?
