It offers huge gains across the board from the likes of the $2,0 Ti, and it does so while consuming less power. Zotac's RTX 4090 makes a bold statement from a first glance, and right now, there isn't a faster video card available. You want plenty of overhead for future games.You need a card that delivers over 100fps at 4K.You want the fastest video card available today.And while the 12VHPWR connector was prone to melting on Founders Edition RTX 4090 units, I didn't see any issues whatsoever on my card. At maximum load, the card will draw 465W of power, so you will need beefy power delivery to handle the requirements of this card. That figure increases to 45W for video playback, and while gaming, you'll see the card hit 375W with relative ease. In idle mode, Zotac's RTX 4090 consumes 35W of power - 15W more than the RTX 4080. The Lovelace architecture also contributes to this, and if you're interested in reading more about the architectural changes, head to my RTX 4080 review. Because of the shift to the 4nm node for this generation, NVIDIA was able to eke out much better efficiency figures.

Before we get to gaming scores, an overview of efficiency. While the RTX 4080 is still a decent choice for gamers using a QHD gaming monitor with a high refresh rate, the best use case for the RTX 4090 is with a 4K monitor. Hardware-level AV1 decode is intact as well, and here's a rundown of the hardware on offer: NVIDIA hasn't changed things much on the connectivity side of things, with the RTX 4090 offering three DisplayPort 1.4a ports along with one HDMI 2.1a port. Obviously, all of these changes result in a higher power draw, and you'll find a TDP of 450W, with the 12+4 pin 12VHPWR connector able to deliver up to 600W of power. What's also new is a huge uptick in the frequencies, with the Zotac RTX 4090 starting out at 2,235MHz core and 2,580MHz boost. If anything, AD102 is smaller than the GA102 silicon that's featured in the RTX 3090 Ti. The shift to a 4nm manufacturing node has allowed NVIDIA to fit 76.3 billion transistors in the AD102 silicon without any increase in size. For starters, it has 16,384 cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory over a 384-bit bus width, leading to a memory bandwidth of 1,008GB/s. The RTX 4090 showcases what's possible with the Ada Lovelace architecture, and there is a lot to like with the card.

(Image credit: Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central)

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