I had a really great plan for our unboxing video for NVIDIA's Flagship RTX
4090 I was gonna unbox the founders Edition but then our lab said sorry
Linus we need it for benchmarking
so I wasn't able to do that then I was gonna unbox one from EVGA
so we'll settle for the next best thing check out this
it's the RTX 4090 from Zotac that's
right friends love gaming power the win
here we go this GPU starts at 1600 US
Dollars which means all the cool features and performance you're about to
hear about can be yours five to six
years from now once the price drops to a more worldly level this bad boy features
over 16 000 of NVIDIA's Cuda cores 24 gigabytes
of gddr6x memory and wow a whopping
power consumption of 450 Watts which necessitates ah this is
cool this new PCI Express Gen 5 12 pin
power connector not only does it have 12
volt and ground pins but it also has
these sense pins that allow your GPU and your power applied to communicate their
capabilities with each other to ensure that your system will never run out of
spec now there's been quite a bit of discussion online about the fragility of
these connectors apparently bending them at a really extreme angle can cause them
to heat up this is actually true of typical PCI Express power connectors as
well but what I will say is that the
problem is probably exacerbated by the tiny tiny pins I wonder what the
motivation was for that when you consider that the graphics cards these
things are going to be attached to are so big
oh I feel like it's too hot for TV but
I'm gonna show it to you this
monster Turbo's up to 2.52 gigahertz in the founders Edition
configuration and overclocked cards could end up exceeding that 2.23
gigahertz base and in spite of all that
NVIDIA claims that configured with a Radeon 5900 X CPU you shouldn't need
more than an 850 watt power supply in
order to power it now what's really
interesting to me looking at a card this size it has a whopping three what appear
to be 100 110 millimeter fans
but the actual length of the PCB is only
up to here which means that this solid
ass hunk of aluminum fins all down the
back which also has a pass-through so you can see this fan right here is just
blowing straight through the cooler is all needed to cool this thing good gravy
now since everything but the unboxing is still embargoed by NVIDIA I'm not able
to share any of our own performance thermal or power consumption numbers
with you guys but we can make some guesses as to where the RTX 49d is going
to stack up in NVIDIA's lineup just based on the slides that they've
published they didn't tell us too much about performance in traditional
rasterized games but we did see anywhere
from two to as much as four times the performance in games using uh RTX Ray
tracing and their new dlss 3.0 technology so it's worth talking about
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code ShortCircuit at bessie.com ShortCircuit first up dlss 3.0 is looking
kind of amazing the first two generations of dlss were pretty
straightforward we rendered at a lower resolution then used machine learning to
upscale that rendered out image to a higher resolution improving visual
Fidelity while hopefully not having too many artifacts or anomalies the LSS 3.0
takes it to a whole new level generating
entire frames in between your existing
frames to help smooth out animations
um I have to wonder if there's going to be a significant latency hit especially
at the kinds of frame rates where you would need such a technology but that's
something we're only going to be able to talk about once we can actually measure
it the other big one though is that their
new Ray tracing cores are supposedly up to double the performance and efficiency
of their old ones which has led to some absolutely
mind-bending demos okay this RC race car
demo that NVIDIA produced I think they had they say 30 of their artists work on
it apparently uses no pre-baked lighting
whatsoever so we are just looking at Material physics to create these effects
that is the kind of thing that I have dreamed about in games since well since
I was old enough to dream about it high school maybe whatever it looks really
cool another big highlight for me has got to be RTX remix man this was a
mind-blowing demo when they pulled out Morrowind and it looked like this the
ability to take an older game and essentially import objects environments
lighting and then edit the game and play
it back with edited elements could be an absolute Game Changer now I have seen
some folks actually speaking out against this type of remixing and the arguments
are are pretty fair you know like you might take away the artist's intended
Ambiance or you might lose things like a
lighting effect that lit up that doorway so that the player would know where to
go next but the flip side of that argument is this might be our only
chance of preserving these types of experiences I mean single player games
without you know a season's pass or any
other kind of games as a service elements are going the way of the
dinosaur and you know thinking about whether or not my kids would be able to
enjoy a game like Morrowind I don't think so not without some
changes I mean even for me I got into Elder Scrolls with the Oblivion entry
and I went back and I tried to play Morrowind after beating Oblivion and I
was like I don't think so throw in some
better objects throw in some better lighting a few Creature Comforts the
kinds that the modding Community has over the years built time and time again
for classic games and man I mean I want
to play it so I I guess what I'm trying
to say is the more tools we can put in the hands of talented PC gaming modders
the better and
I commend NVIDIA another big feature for RTX 40 series is their dual av1 encoders
we haven't actually looked at NVIDIA's encoders yet because you know the thing
I said before but what we have been able to do is look at the hardware av-1
encoders on Intel's Arc gpus and so far av1 is looking extremely promising we
are talking similar performance to h.264
at around 60 the bit rate
absolutely wild especially if you're someone who wants to game stream but you
don't have an amazing internet connection or you want to Arc I have a
ton of your gameplay footage and you don't want to deal with enormous file
sizes also um Studio drivers and video reflex okay
that's mostly stuff that we've seen before so why don't we take a closer
look at the i o we've got HDMI 2.1 a all
right as well as actually this is a bit of a disappointment three DisplayPort
1.4 ports I was kind of hoping for DisplayPort 2.0 uhbr 10 because that's
what Intel is shipping on their Arc gpus but I guess we aren't getting that I do
want to take a closer look at this Zotac card though this thing is absolutely
wild is that nine heat pipes full-size
back play with backlighting
that's got to be like uh that's gonna be a mode switcher right here I actually
don't really know that much about it because the reality of it is even at
sixteen hundred dollars people are gonna buy it so ultimately
you're gonna end up with whatever RTX 490 is in stock even if this thing is
only you know 30 40 50 faster than a 30
90 TI in traditionally rendered games which it looks like it could very well
be NVIDIA really didn't want to talk about that that much 30 90 TI's are
still going for like 800 to 950 bucks on
eBay 30 90s though ooh 390s are down like 700 750 which means that could be a
pretty compelling option compared to this that's got to be Jake leaving for
the day he's the only one with a car that loud this is actually a greater
than three slot card can you guys believe this we've gotten to the point
where I mean how far off just having like a seven wide like you just put it
in that top PCIe slot and it's less of just it's less of a card and more of
just like a module you just take the whole thing and you just put the whole
thing in there it just takes up the whole Space you know now that I've said it someone like Jesus is totally gonna
build that anyway we can't really speculate on all the
details when it comes to Performance because we haven't been allowed to test the card and talk about it yet so that's
it ShortCircuit unboxing and get over on LTT so you can check out the full
review