RTX 3090 Gaming OC
The Titan of the RTX 30 series.
As if the performance of the RTX 3080 wasn’t enough, may we present to you the flagship of the RTX 30 range, the RTX 3090! Given its GeForce branding you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a gaming oriented card, and truly it’s the best gaming card on the market, but actually it’s more appropriate to consider the RTX 3090 as this generation’s Titan.
The RTX 3090 uses the GA102 GPU, the same as the one the RTX 3080 uses, however it utilises 10496 cores compared to the 8704 of the 3080 and it has a wider memory bus, at 384 bits vs the 320 of the 3080. Clearly it’s a powerful card. Whereas all Titan cards were exclusively produced by Nvidia, this time around partner designs are allowed. This means we’re seeing cards equipped with better coolers and PCB designs, in turn delivering lower noise levels and better performance. One such card is the Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC we are covering here.
Of course the RTX 3090 includes all of the key features of the Ampere generation including improved ray tracing support thanks to updated RTX cores, Deep Learning Super Sampling, improved fixed function video encoding and decoding, HDMI 2.1 support, PCIe 4.0 and an improved Tensor core design. As a rebranded Titan, it will appeal to users who may not go all out on Quadro cards. You’ll definitely want to check out the Nvidia Studio driver if you’re looking for appropriate application support.
The huge 24GB frame buffer means it’s well equipped to handle the demands of professional applications. Large data sets, high resolution textures, 8K video and RAW files will all benefit. The generational performance uplift over the Titan RTX is one thing, but there’s also the fact that the 3090 is well over $1,000 cheaper than The Titan RTX. When viewed though that lens, the 3090 is quite the bargain.
Even if Nvidia positions the RTX 3090 as a replacement for the Titan RTX, it’s still branded as a GeForce card and that means its gaming performance matters. It’s faster than the 3080, even the higher clocked partner cards we covered elsewhere in this issue.
Does the performance gain justify the cost increase? Probably not, but then that 24GB of fast memory and near 1TB/s of memory bandwidth are likely to serve the 3090 well in the future. If 8K gaming becomes truly viable, you’ll want that extra frame buffer. The 10GB of the 3080 may not be enough in a couple of years.
The RTX 3090 is the only 30 series card to include the NVlink connector and SLI support. Nvidia recently announced that it will stop adding new SLI driver profiles from January, instead leaving support up to the game developers. It would surprise us if even 0.1% of gamers will use dual 3090s. Developers will not waste resources to accommodate such a tiny market share. This means SLI is effectively dead,
but, you can still claim to have the fastest gaming rig on the planet for now if you buy two.
Gigabyte kindly sent over its RTX 3090 Gaming OC. It’s one of several Gigabyte 3090s including one with a blower cooler and extending upward to the ultrapremium Aorus Master with its quad slot(!) cooler. The Gaming OC is still a very large card, occupying three PCIe slots and measuring in at 320mm long. Its video outputs consist of a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports and three v1.4a DisplayPorts.
The cooler of the Gaming OC appears to be tuned towards performance more than absolute silence. Of all the 3080s plus this 3090, it’s the loudest of the cards, though it’s not an obtrusive noise and it’s much better than some of the blower-style coolers from the past. The maximum temperature we saw was just 65c, a very impressive result. We’re still far from summer’s big heat though, so if you’re running the card inside a poorly ventilated case at that time, perhaps noise levels will become concerning in a month or two.
The Gaming OC comes with a small core overclock at 1755MHz, up from the 1695 of the Founders Edition, but as we saw when testing the RTX 3080, the rated boost clock is almost meaningless as we saw the card clock itself over 1850MHz. The memory clock remains unchanged at 19.5Gbps. With a 384 bit bus, this means the card has an incredible 936GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is a nice increase over the 760GB/s of the 3080.
How we rate the 3090 depends on what kind of user you are. A gamer will find the RTX 3080 better value. The 3090 is around 10 to 15 percent faster, which alone isn’t a large enough gain to justify the extra cost. The huge 24GB of memory and oodles of bandwidth will give you that bit of future proofing particularly if you’re one of the few with an 8K TV. If you must have the best, and have more than a few dollars in the bank, you will love it but most gamers outside of the money-isno-object group likely won’t consider it over the RTX 3080.
Gamers might not see a huge amount of added value over the 3080, but professionals and content creators certainly will. Users of Titan cards will love the performance uplift along with the relatively affordable price compared to previous generation Titan cards. This class of user will find it a compelling purchase.
Gigabyte has done a good job with the RTX 3090 Gaming OC. It mightn’t be the card with the most bells and whistles or take records with ln2 overclocking, but its cooler is capable of taming the TDP of the GA102 GPU, allowing it to boost to levels well above the official rated clock. If you want silent operation or huge OC headroom and triple 8-pin power, there are more expensive options to suit. It’s hard to call a card within touching distance of $3,000 a value proposition, but relatively speaking it is.
If you want the best graphics card on the market, here it is, just be prepared to cough up big bucks. Most of us would never consider a $3,000 GPU, but Nvidia built it anyway. People are buying up every card that comes onto the market, and they’ll be loving it. The RTX 3090 is the best there is. CHRIS SZEWCZYK
The RTX 3090 offers massive gaming and compute power, but is it really worth the price of two 3080s?