From playable 8K gaming to absolutely jaw-dropping performance in creative workloads, the RTX 3090 can do just about anything with best-in-class performance. The RTX 3090 is an impressively huge graphics card, thanks in large part to its incredible cooling solution that keeps this powerful GPU running at a safe temperature, but that does mean that a lot of cases won't be able to fit it.

There's plenty of reasons why people may want to buy the RTX 3090, as it's a cutting edge and future-proof graphics card that can also dabble in 8K gaming. Just like the RTX 3080, the Founders Edition of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is hands-down the best cooler design Team Green has ever shipped itself. While this is an absolutely massive graphics card – the thing is 12.3 inches long, is a 3-slot card, and weighs, well a lot. Look, we don't have a scale, and Nvidia doesn't list the weight, but it's easily more than 7 lb. However, we have to talk about power consumption. At its peak during our testing, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 consumed a maximum of 357 Watts. That's a lot of juice, especially if you're pairing it with a powerful processor. Nvidia recommends a minimum power supply of 750W, but we would go further and just recommend a full 1,000W PSU with this card, just to be sure you don't run into any random shutdowns if your power supply isn't running at peak efficiency. The basic design of the RTX 3090 is similar to other Nvidia Ampere cards, only this card is much bigger. (Image credit: Future)

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is a mighty big BFGPU, but can it justify its pricetag?

But you can bet your bottom dollar that we threw this graphics card into our personal machine and tried it across a wide spectrum of PC games, both at 4K and 8K DSR to see how it performs.

There are a range of UK and US retailers with RTX 3090 graphics cards available who will build an RTX 3090 PC for you. You do pay a premium for the privilege - and your computer won't arrive as early - but this is still a great option for anyone without the time or inclination to build for themselves. Retailer As we mentioned in our RTX 3080 review, both the Tensor cores and RT cores that Nvidia has made such a huge deal of these past couple graphics card generations see big improvements, too. Namely, throughput of RT cores has doubled with the second-generation ones present on RTX 3000 series cards.

At first glance, the small bump up from the 72 SMs on the Nvidia Turing-based Titan RTX seems like a minor improvement, but one of the most groundbreaking differences with the Ampere architecture is the ability for both datapaths on each SM being able to handle FP32 workloads. This means that CUDA core counts per SM is effectively doubled, which is why the RTX 3090 is such a rendering behemoth. Just like its little sibling, the RTX 3080, the RTX 3090 is built on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, using the full-fat GA102 GPU. This time around, we're getting 82 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), making for a total of 10,496 CUDA cores, along with 328 Tensor cores and 82 RT Cores.

At 4K, however, the RTX 3090 does provide the level of performance where you can just crank every setting up to max and just forget about it. Every single game we tried to play with this graphics card at 4K ran like a dream. Final Fantasy XV with everything turned up? 70+ fps – with the stutter that game is infamous for almost completely eliminated thanks to the 24GB frame buffer. Surprisingly, 8K gaming is actually a possibility for this card, although it does take some sacrifices to get there. Most people will instead choose to game at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, the resolutions Digital Foundry tested more in-depth in their RTX 3090 review. Compared to the RTX 3080, the 3090 is around 10 to 15 per cent faster at 4K, with a narrower gap - on average - at lower resolutions. Right now, 8K pretty much exclusively exists in the realm of high-end TVs, which means the panels aren't exactly widespread. That will almost certainly change in the coming years, but right now there isn't a single gaming monitor that supports the resolution. The games we selected for testing are there to push the GPU to its limits, so we can compare the performance delta between different graphics cards. They provide easily repeatable benchmark scripts, so we can be sure the exact same workload is applied to each graphics card.Nvidia's impressive Ampere architecture is on full display with the RTX 3090, featuring over 10,000 CUDA cores, second generation RT cores, and third generation Tensor cores to accelerate machine learning tasks. But where the RTX 3090 really shines is in 3D Rendering through applications like Blender and Autodesk Maya. In fact, while in games the RTX 3090 is around 50% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, the 3090 is nearly twice as fast as the Turing flagship in Blender, rendering through the benchmark in just 229 seconds to the RTX 2080 Ti's 438 seconds. That's a 91% improvement, thanks in large part to the sheer amount of VRAM and FP32 performance on offer here. It's strange to give the RTX 3090 credit for its value proposition, given that its such an expensive card, but considering that this is much more of a prosumer/professional card, this is downright cheap for a workstation-class GPU. You'll need an adapter to get power to the 12-pin connector on the RTX 3090, but fortunately it comes with the card. (Image credit: Future) Now that we've all been working from home for so long, and with it looking like that's going to become the new normal, anything that makes video conferencing less stressful is a huge benefit. The best part is that this technology is available to anyone with an Nvidia RTX-powered device.

The redesign of the PCB on the RTX 3090 requires a whole new 12-pin power connector. (Image credit: Future) It should be noted that the NVENC encoder is the same here as on the RTX 2080 Ti, which means performance doesn't change much generation-to-generation. However, now that this encoder is supported in Adobe Premiere, nearly the entire video production workflow is now accelerated by the GPU, which makes a dedicated GPU incredibly beneficial to video editors. Encoding a video using the NVENC encoder, rather than through software cuts the time in half – even when we're using the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X paired with 64GB of RAM running at 3,600MHz. It is a bit unsightly, however, and it's hard to have the same kind of clean cable setup as you would have otherwise. However, third-party graphics card manufacturers are using the same 8-pin power connector as always, so you can always just go with one of those if you need to. But while the RT Core takes on a huge bulk of that workload, ray tracing is still a very computationally expensive technology, which means that it still has a heavy performance cost, which is why DLSS is becoming more and more important, both in gaming and in programs like D5 Render. In games like World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and Destiny 2, we were able to get a steady 60-70 fps at this extremely high resolution, but with quality settings at high, rather than having all the eye candy turned on. This isn't as big a loss as it sounds, as the 24GB of VRAM is enough so that we didn't have to turn down textures.Given the present market and the previous generation of professional-grade graphics cards, the RTX 3090 exists in kind of a middle ground. The GeForce name suggests that this graphics card is aimed at gamers, but the specs and pricing suggest that it's more geared towards prosumers that need raw rendering power, but aren't quite ready to jump into the Nvidia Quadro and Tesla worlds. Where the RTX 3090 really shines, however, is in 3D Rendering and encoding, making it hugely compelling to creative professionals that need this level of performance without investing thousands of dollars in a Quadro or Tesla card. If you've come here looking to buy the RTX 3090 then you've probably seen the huge excitement surrounding the card so far - especially after videos from the likes of MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips demonstrating the graphics card driving an immensely expensive 8K monitor in some recent games. This comes with a sizable 3-5% performance loss, but otherwise provides a good glimpse at what 8K gaming performance looks like. As you may be able to discern from the charts above, the RTX 3090 doesn't provide the straight 8K 60 fps experience in the most demanding games on PC. But like most things, it's complicated. Oh lawd it's coming. We reported yesterday that RTX 3090 TI Founders Edition cards are likely to be just as big as the prior RTX 3090 versions. That means this one will probably be another three-slot GPU - an absolute giant in GPU terms.