Why Nvidia RTX 4090 is not worth buying over RTX 4080 and AMD RX 7900 XTX

The Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 is the current-gen flagship offering from the company. The card is decked out with the latest technology from Team Green. It is based on the latest Ada Lovelace architecture and is the best money can buy.

AMD, however, is not taking it lightly: the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is here with a much better value proposition and practical performance. The Santa Clara-based manufacturer has been crowned the value king since last-gen. Team Red is not slowing down this generation.

The RTX 4080 is quite close to the RX 7900 XTX in terms of performance. Thus, many users might consider one GPU over the other. In this article, we will go over these offerings and find out which is the best option.

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The RTX 4090 — although a fantastic card — isn't for everyone

The RTX 4090 is the fastest card ever built — as we discovered in our review. The GPU is built on a power-efficient design and screams premium in every possible dimension. Gamers will be delighted by what the card has to offer.

We recorded triple-digit framerates in multiple demanding titles at resolutions of up to 4K. But the card feels excessive in many scenarios.

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Specs

A look at the specs table reveals the RTX 4090's monstrous power. The lower-end 4080 seems like a massive downgrade, and it is. With over 40% fewer CUDA cores and a smaller 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, the card is about 25% slower than the flagship, according to TechPowerUp's GPU computing power aggregates.

Metric	Geforce RTX 4090	Radeon RX 7900 XTX	Geforce RTX 4080
GPU Name	AD102	Navi 31	AD103
CUDA Core (Nvidia) / Streaming Processor (AMD) Count	16,384	12,288	9,728
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)	512	384	304
Render Output Units (ROPs)	176	192	112
Ray Tracing (RT) Core Count	128	84	76
Tensor Core Count	512	N/A	304
Compute Units	N/A	96	N/A
Video Memory Size	24 GB	24 GB	16 GB
Video Memory Type	GDDR6X	GDDR6	GDDR6X
Video Memory Bus Width	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Base Clock Speed	2235 MHz	1900 MHz	2205 MHz
Boost Clock Speed	2520 MHz	2505 MHz	2505 MHz
Memory Clock Speed	1313 MHz	2500 MHz	1400 MHz
MSRP	US$ 1,599	US$ 999	US$ 1,199

A direct comparison with the RX 7900 XTX, however, is not practical since the AMD flagship is built on a wildly different RDNA 3 architecture.

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Performance differences

In terms of performance, we can expect all video cards to impress. The RTX 4090, however, crushes the others by a huge margin in the 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks. These tests judge the rasterization performance using the DirectX 12 and 11 APIs, respectively.

However, in Port Royal, the RX 7900 XTX administers a defeat to both the Nvidia cards. This benchmark tests the ray tracing performance of the GPUs — a proven Team Green stronghold.

	RTX 4090	RX 7900 XTX	RTX 4080
3DMark Port Royal	25,692	15,793	17,650
3DMark Time Spy	36,037	29,619	28,102
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra	24,238	19,793	17,394

These benchmark results prove that none of these video cards will be underwhelming for gaming.

Thanks to Benchmark Lab, we have had some thorough testing results of GPUs in some of the latest and most demanding titles on the market. All games run at 4K at the highest settings unless otherwise mentioned.

	RTX 4090	RX 7900 XTX	RTX 4080
Cyberpunk 2077 (RT on)	74	51	55
Red Dead Redemption 2	122	90	86
Spider-Man Remastered (RT on)	107	78	76
Microsoft Flight Simulator (Native)	115	91	88
Microsoft Flight Simulator (DLSS 3.0/FSR 2.0 on)	168	95	132

These cards can play even the most resource-heavy games flawlessly at 4K 60 FPS without major hiccups. However, the RTX 4090 is in a league of its own. It consistently delivers triple-digit framerates even at 4K with the highest settings applied.

DLSS 3.0 with frame generation technique is another deciding factor when buying GPUs. While AMD is slated to introduce some form of this tech with their upcoming cards, we don't have a release date yet. Meanwhile, Team Green is already impressing us with what AI can achieve.

A closer look at the performance uplift unveils that even the RTX 4080 can hit 120 FPS or more at max settings in UHD in a very demanding title like Microsoft Flight Simulator, where the upscaling tech works in tandem with the CPU to deliver higher framerate bumps. Even the AMD flagship can get close to a hundred frames with FSR.

Thus, although impressive, the RTX 4090 delivers a performance that most gamers do not have a use for. The 7900 XTX and 4080 can already deliver up to 120 FPS in some competitive titles like Warzone 2.0 and Fortnite.

Thus, the RTX 4090 seems more of a professional GPU built for tasks like video editing, 3D modeling, and more. It isn't worth the extra $400-600 over the other options in the market unless someone has deep pockets to exploit.