The GeForce RTX 4090 will the big standard-bearer of the new generation of NVIDIAit’s not for nothing that we’re talking about the most powerful graphics card that will hit the market in the GeForce RTX 40 series, and a priori it seems that it has everything to become the fastest in the world as well.

The first performance figures shared by NVIDIA point in that direction, confirming that this graphics card is powerful enough to move games in 8K resolution and maximum quality, even enabling ray tracing in one of the comparison titles (Fortnite).

We have already told you all the keys to the architecture of Ada Lovelace and GeForce RTX 40, so in this article I will focus directly on the interpretation of the graph that you can find in the attached image. In order to do this, the first thing we need to be clear about is the values ​​it represents and the configuration both from the games and from the test team.

In green we have performance data without DLSS and light green results with DLSS enabled. All games have been set to maximum qualityand the test device was based on a Core i9-12900K, 32 GB of RAM and a GeForce RTXX 4090 FE. It is also important to note that DLSS was configured in mode “higher performance”and preferably with image generation technology.

Performance figures without DLSS are spectacular, even in demanding titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Microsoft Flight Simulator, especially considering the graphical load of both and the fact that the latter is known to have a bottleneck of quite deep CPU. Without DLSS we find the count 33,177,600 pixels a giddy character in games.

GeForce RTX 4090 performance at 8K without DLSS

• Apex Legends: 88 FPS.
• Ray-traced Fortnite: around 30 FPS.
• Forza Horizon 5 – around 60 FPS.
• Hunt: Showdown: 83 FPS.
• Lost Ark: 108 FPS.
• Microsoft Flight Simulator – almost 30 FPS.
• Naraka: Bladepoint: 30+ FPS.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: more than 30 FPS.
• War Thunder: over 100 FPS.

GeForce RTX 4090 performance at 8K with DLSS

• Ray-traced Fortnite: 82 FPS.
• Forza Horizon 5: 94 FPS.
• Microsoft Flight Simulator: 83 FPS.
• Naraka: Bladepoint: 98 FPS.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 85 FPS.
• War Thunder: 164 FPS.

There is no doubt that the GeForce RTX 4090 is so powerful that we can consider it to be the first graphics card with enough power to “tame” 8K resolutionas it achieves perfectly playable average FPS in most cases even at maximum quality and without the need to resort to DLSS.

However, when we activate this scaling, reconstruction and intelligent image generation technology, we see that the performance increases exponentially and that in some cases it practically triples. It is true that DLSS reduces the rendering resolution, but the end result is so good that the experience ends very similar to what we would have with native rendering. In this case, the initial resolution is so high (7,680 x 4,320 pixels) that even with DLSS in ultra performance mode, we should get a sharp and clean image.