this is the world's fastest gaming GPU
as of yesterday today envidia
launches this the GeForce RTX 490 a
massive improvement over its predecessor in almost every way so why aren't I more
excited the fact that I could you know
buy a cheap used car for what NVIDIA is asking for this aside there are some
other problems that we need to talk about right after I tell you about our
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below 2 years ago the GeForce RTX 390
launched at an eyew watering $1,500 us
and NVIDIA's justification for this was that it was a Titan class GPU now of
course we all know now that that was BS
as NVIDIA launched the RTX 390 TI just 6
months ago in March of 2022 at two grand
with a very modest spec bump for the price and still no Titan class floating
Point compute functionality both cards are available at around $1,000 or so
today thanks to the crash and GPU demand and competition from AMD is actually
coming in a little bit less than that the RTX 490 that launches at
$1600 us what do you get for the price
of three PS5 gaming consoles it's not a
Titan class GPU and it has the same amount of vram as the previous gen RTX
390 but that's where the similarities end not only is the memory as fast as
what you'd find on an RTX 39 90 TI
you're getting over 50% more Cuda cor that are each clocked at over 35% higher
I mean say what you want but that alone would be a substantial upgrade for a
mere 7% increase in MSRP which is half
the rate of inflation since 2020 what a steal is what I would say if it weren't
for the fact that it's it's honestly it's still the price of an entire
mid-range gaming PC on its own so what else does this bring to the table and
NVIDIA claims that each of their Cuda cores is beefed up compared to the
outgoing ampere architecture in almost all respects with claimed performance
improvements of up to two times what the 30 series could achieve that's thanks in
large part to nearly double the L1 cach and a substantial change in the core
layout itself and also to the use of tsmc's new N4 process that allows the
total die area to be nearly 150 mm squared smaller than its
predecessor of course we need to test NVIDIA's claims so we cut the lamps to
fire up our shiny new socket am5 bench with a fresh install of Windows 1122 H1
and go to town with testing why 22 H1
apparently 22 H2 introduced some issues that NVIDIA is not going to have ironed
out by the time this video airs but for now let's turn our attention to the main
event games and right out of the gate
okay no these numbers aren't right turns out stability issues with our bench
messed up the settings and enabled fidelity FX upscaling our bad it's still
really good though that's over 60 FPS most of the time in Native 4K we're also
looking at minimum frame rates Beyond 120 at 4K in fors of horizon 5 compared
to sub 90 on the 390 TI and it is
incredibly stable Assassin's Creed Valhalla frame rate also shut up by
about 50% on the 490 enabling 4K 120 FPS
gameplay without any compromises remember this is just the rasterization
performance what we thought NVIDIA was trying to hide from us by showing off
their RT performance in the Press materials Far Cry 6 another Ubisoft
title doesn't seem quite the same Improvement however at about 30% or so
across the board it's not bad like not
at all but I'm just ruined after seeing those other results improvements
continue to become more modest in Shadow the Tomb Raider where we're likely starting to get CPU Limited at 4K I'll
let that sink in for a moment maybe watch washed down with a big Swig from
our chungus 64 Oz water bottle from LTD store.com we see exactly that problem
again when we run csgo where for some bizarre reason the situation is flipped
on its head the RTX 390 TI outperforms
the 490 throughout multiple runs it's
especially surprising because the GPU core clocks and the load remained High I
mean if you've got an explanation I'd love to see your take in the comments
dropping the resolution down to 1440p it seems like we're becoming even more more
CPU bound but critically the minimum frame rates in fors of horizon 5 are
massively improved making for a smoother overall experience interestingly CSG go
actually manages to return to normal C at 1440p so I don't know maybe we've got
a driver bug at 4K or something now do
you still remember that cyberpunk
result yeah okay okay so check this out
proportionately we're looking at an even bigger performance Improvement compared
to traditional rendering at nearly double the 390 TI although we're not
quite able to pull off 60 FPS at 4K without
dlss and when we turn rate tracing on in the much older shadow of the Tomb Raider
the 4090 is capable of nearly doubling the minimum FPS of the 3090
TI that brings this title from Mostly 60
FPS or more at 4K to a buttery smooth
100 to 12 20 dfps all without
dlss with dlss in performance mode cyber
hook manages close to 100 FPS and minimum frame rates enough to be quite
smooth with gsync enabled so long as you can handle the image quality shadow of
the Tomb Raider in dlss quality mode is just ridiculous where the 3090 TI can't
quite reach 90 FPS and 5% lows the 4090
is fast enough to comfortably Drive 144hz 4k monitor
now you might be wondering about the uh new dlss 3.0 NVIDIA's AI frame
generation technology we're wondering
too unfortunately all of our cards even
the third party ones that we're not allowed to show you today all of them
crashed a lot like a lot a lot even
across multiple benches as a result the Labs weren't able to properly test dlss
3.0 and we'd like more rate tracing results than we got we'll have all of
that missing data in a follow-up so stay tuned but okay what if you're not a big
gamer well you're in luck because this
thing is also a productivity beast in
blender it gets over double the samples per minute in both the monster and junk
shop scenes and just under double in the older classroom scene that's a
substantial Time Savings and might be worth it on its own if you're a 3D
artist similarly our 4K Da Vinci resolve
export finished nearly a minute faster a difference of roughly 25% something that
that'll also add up over time especially for timelines with a lot of rendered
graphical effects spec view perf meanwhile shows massive gains across the
board with the most substantial improvements in 3ds Max Maya medical and
solid works that nearly double the score well Creo only saw a modest performance
Improvement of around 10% still this is like looking at a completely different
class of GPU not a typical generational improvement with all of these
performance gains maybe NVIDIA had to price these at $1,600 that they had any
hope at all of selling through all of their mining Surplus
390s and that's not everything either
another big part of productivity that many companies Intel and apple included
are taking very seriously is video encoding and NVIDIA's out to prove that
they're not sleeping on the job not only do you get the same highquality encoder
that first debuted on the RTX 20 series as we saw in our Da Vinci resolve test
but you get two of them and they're both capable of
av1 av1 is the new codec that's likely
to take over for live and On Demand streaming on sites like YouTube and
twitch and while it can produce significantly better video quality at
the same bit rates it's significantly more timec consuming and difficult to
encode unless you have Hardware dedicated for it Intel Arc launch with
it as a headline feature and it's a safe bet that it'll become more important as
time goes on un fortunately we don't have the time right now to do a proper
test of it for the review so again stay tuned for a future video comparing av1
encoders what I can tell you today is that it's nearly as fast as NVIDIA's
existing h264 and h265 encoders which is
pretty impressive of course all of these
capabilities come with some drawbacks the first of which being the power draw
in order to reach the power Target that NVIDIA sent for it the RTX 490
universally requ Ires an ATX 3.0 connector and comes with adapter swort
in the Box as the specs indicated our RTX 490 draws nearly as much power under
gaming load as the RTX 390 TI though it
did stay closer to 425 Watts than it's rated 450 this is a sharp contrast
against the RTX 390 and 6950 XT which
consistently both pulled nearly 100 Watts less this does not bode well for
an eventual RTX 490 TI at least the
power Targets on the 480 series cards are lower though we don't have any of
those to test today when we hit the RTX 490 with a more demanding load via MSI
combuster power consumption skyrockets the red line for both the RTX 490 and
the 3090 TI though curiously about halfway through it kind of dips down to
about 440 which is kind of strange meanwhile the RTX 390 once again doesn't
cross that 350 W threshold and neither did the 6950 XT with great power of
course comes great thermal output capacity and the RTX 490 is no exception
with thermals while gaming tracking roughly in line with the power
consumption its massive 3 and 1 half slot cooler keeps the hot spot at the
80° Mark while gaming placing it squarely between the RTX 390 and the
6950 XT despite the power draw a testament to NVIDIA's cooler design core
Clocks Were obviously way higher than any previous gen card and crucially they
remained just as stable throughout the run at about 2.6 to 2.7 GHz when we look
at again at our combuster results though the hot spot temperature crosses the 80°
threshold along with the RTX 390 TI and we again see that slight dip halfway end
of the run while the 3090 sits below 70°
core clocks end up significantly lower at around 2.25 GHz for the 4090 with the
3090 TI throttling down to below its less power hungry sibling our AMD card
meanwhile sort of did a heartbeat pattern of boosting and throttling that
could result in uneven performance it's worth noting that the these tests were
performed inside of a coair 5000d air flow with a 360 mm rat up top and 3 120
mm fans drawing air up front so it's not
like we were starving the carrots for oxygen or feeding them hot air from the
CPU in fact in spite of all the air flow we gave them the RTX 490 and 390 TI both
caused internal casair temperatures to hit highs of 39 to 40° with
significantly higher minimum internal temperatures than the RTX 390 all at an
ambient temperature of around 21° that means that if your case can
just barely handle a 3090 you won't be able to manage a
4090 sorry small form factor efficient Autos this card is not for you after all
that you might look at the spec sheet and have some lingering questions like
why isn't NVIDIA supporting PCI Express Gen 5 and where's DisplayPort 2.0 and
the answer to those questions both of them whether you like it or not is that
NVIDIA doesn't think you need on a $1600
graphics card you you smell that yeah that's the
distinct scent of copium while it's true that a GPU running a whole 16 Lanes of
PCI Express Gen 5 probably won't be super useful today a GPU running eight
Lanes of Gen 5 certainly would be especially for those who also want lots
of NVMe storage a good bet for a card of this class remember the faster the PCI
Express link the fewer the lanes you need for the same bandwidth require IR
ments NVIDIA should know this as for
DisplayPort 2.0 the official line is
DisplayPort 1.0 already supports 8K at
60 HZ and consumer displays won't need more for a while which is pretty valid
well it's true that DisplayPort 1.4 only supports up to 120 HZ at full
unadulterated resolution can go up to 268 HZ with no chroma sub sampling using
display stream compression which is reported to be visually lossless that's
pretty good consider considering displays that can refresh faster than that aren't very common still I would
argue that this is a suboptimal experience on such premium Hardware 240
HZ 4K displays exist today and will have
DisplayPort 2.0 support soon Arc already supports it and rdna 3 has been
confirmed to support DisplayPort 2.0 since May NVIDIA is clearly trying to
save a book again on a GPU that costs as
much as a series X A PS5 a switch and a steam deck combined or maybe these cards
were just ready and waiting in a warehouse for longer than we realized
it's incredibly amusing to me that the first GPU that might actually be capable
of running 8K gaming without asterisks
is being handled in such a lacad isical fashion by team green the days of
generational performance per dollar gains are over they say Moore's Law is
dead they say and yet the competition
doesn't seem to think so while it's true that nobody can touch the 490s mammoth
performance right now as we saw with the RTX 390 that won't last forever and
that's where things get weird as it exists right now while the RTX 490 chugs
as much power as an RTX 3090 TI it is a
massive upgrade over both that card and the vanilla 390 in nearly every respect
well in excess of its price increase for Content creators this is a no-brainer
but I cannot in good cont ience recommend Gamers with more dollars than
cents go out and purchase a piece of Hardware that is incapable of driving
the also very expensive displays that might actually be able to take advantage
of it especially when a less expensive and less power hungry card perhaps even
NVIDIA's own RTX 480s can do the same
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watching guys uh this is well I guess a little bit more positive and also
negative than the Intel Arc review go check that review out as well for a
little bit on the increasing competition in the GPU space I think we uh we all
think that it's long overdue