Nvidia can be delivery us our evaluate unit of the RTX 4090 very quickly, so we’re naturally very excited to get our arms on it and discover out whether or not or not it justifies its lofty price ticket. Within the meantime, Nvidia was gracious sufficient to deal with us to some check footage of Cyberpunk 2077 operating on the brand new GPU, particularly to indicate off the brand new energy of DLSS 3.

The demo was run at 1400p decision and most graphical settings (with Extremely Ray Tracing turned on), and Nvidia helpfully displayed some energetic GPU metrics on display screen throughout the showcase, which revealed some nifty details about how nicely the RTX 4090 was operating the sport.

The primary – and probably essentially the most fascinating – nuggets of data we bought was that this RTX 4090 was operating at increase clocks at excessive as 2,850MHz, which is definitely 330Hz larger than the initially reported ‘official’ increase clock of two,520MHz. Nvidia had beforehand talked about that the GPU breached 3,000MHz when overclocked throughout inner testing, so this isn’t fully surprising, but it surely’s good to see the cardboard operating at a robust overclock.

When it comes to precise efficiency in-game, the RTX 4090 ran Cyberpunk 2077 at a median framerate simply shy of 60fps when utilizing native decision and with DLSS Three turned off. Turning on DLSS 3 (within the High quality preset) gave an enormous efficiency leap, taking the common framerate as much as 171fps and reducing energy consumption by greater than 110W.

That’s a large performance-per-Watt enchancment, which is heartening to see provided that the brand new RTX GPUs are pretty power-hungry parts. It goes past simply framerates, too; enabling Nvidia’s third-generation upscaling tech additionally lowered the common latency by 29%, and likewise barely lowered the utmost working temperature of the cardboard, which sat between 50C and 53C throughout the DLSS Three demo.

Evaluation: DLSS Three can be most helpful for lower-end playing cards

DLSS Three received’t be essential (or supported) for lots of video games, and if you happen to’ve bought an RTX 4090 you positively received’t want it for many titles given the sheer uncooked energy of the GPU. It’s truly the lower-spec GPUs, just like the suspiciously underpowered 12GB RTX 4080, and any potential future cheaper playing cards such because the RTX 4070, that can profit from it essentially the most.

DLSS has made enormous strides since its introduction, to the purpose the place it now allows lower-spec graphics playing cards to run demanding video games at larger resolutions with out massively sacrificing framerates. It’s additionally virtually essential for video games with resource-intensive ray-tracing processes, like Cyberpunk 2077 (which is presumably why Nvidia selected that sport to demo DLSS 3).

We’re a bit disenchanted to see that DLSS Three probably received’t be coming to older RTX playing cards; a minimum of, not anytime quickly. A number of the greatest GPUs, just like the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti, may very well be critically elevated by third-gen DLSS, but it surely seems like Nvidia desires to maintain it as a key RTX 4000 promoting level for now.

With RTX 3000 and older playing cards getting cheaper and cheaper, although, the RTX 4090 launch might sign the proper time to snap up a great graphics card deal – particularly if you happen to’re not planning on taking part in at 4K Extremely. Should you’re nonetheless rocking a 1080p monitor, grabbing a 3000-series GPU as soon as the 4000 collection arrives and the worth drops observe may very well be a wise transfer. Black Friday is looming, in spite of everything…