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The upcoming Nvidia RTX 4090 appears to be the fastest GPU ever tested

Nvidia’s RTX 30-series graphics cards are some of the best graphics cards on the market today, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels. They’ve been working on a new 40-series, one of which reportedly broke all speed records. The Nvidia RTX 4090 scored 19,000 on a 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark test.

That’s fast. We’re talking blazing speeds and faster than anything else on the market. Put another way, the RTX 4090 blew the former reigning graphic processor, the liquid-cooled RTX 3090 Ti “King Pin,” out of the water. The 4090 did that without the need for liquid nitrogen.

The MSI Suprim X RTX 3080 installed in a PC.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is still shrouded in secrecy, but the good folk over at Tom’s Hardware speculate the 5nm chip could pack 60 billion transistors, hit clock speeds of 2000 MHz, and reach VRAM speeds of up to 24GBps. All of that while inhaling a whopping 500 to 600 watts of power.

By comparison, the RTX 3090 King Pin hits clock speeds of 1590Hz and boost speeds of 1950Hz. Its memory clocks in at 21GBps, and it still needs to gulp 450 watts of power to run efficiently.

So, the RTX 4090 is 30% faster while consuming just over 20% more power than the RTX 3090 Ti.

3DMark is a benchmarking tool from UL that tests graphic processor speeds. The Time Spy Extreme version is the latest and is considered the most accurate GPU benchmarking tool you can get today. The 3DMark Hall of Fame lists the RTX 3090 Ti as the fastest GPU ever tested.

The RTX 4090 hasn’t been added to the list because the test unit was not an official Nvidia release. We don’t know if the benchmarks were conducted on a leaked test unit or an official pre-release unit, and there has been no confirmation from Nvidia. There are more unknowns than knowns at this point.

What we do know is that the RTX 30-series are incredible chips, Nvidia is working on an RTX 40-series, and both chips represent insane graphic speeds. The future of gaming is good.

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Nathan Drescher
Nathan Drescher is a freelance journalist and writer from Ottawa, Canada. He's been writing about technology from around the…
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