The next generation of graphics cards is officially launching today, with Nvidia's RTX 4090(opens in new tab) on sale 12th October at 6am PT | 9am ET | 2pm BST. We've been obsessively benchmarking a bunch of different versions of the new Ada Lovelace GPUs over the past couple of weeks, and it represents a genuinely impressive piece of technical graphics wizardry.
There is no other graphics card on the market today that can come close to the power and performance of the RTX 4090, whether that's for rendering, gaming, or going all out and ray tracing at 4K and beyond. And even though AMD is set to announce its new chiplet-based RDNA 3 graphics cards in early November, the rumours suggest the top card is unlikely to best the RTX 4090.
There will be slightly more affordable Ada graphics cards arriving next month, too, but whether they'll have the same generational impact as the RTX 4090 is tough to say. We're not convinced.
So, for now, if you want the magic that is the best graphics card in the world right now, that $1,599 price tag is what you need to pay. That's the base MSRP, and the price of the excellent Nvidia Founders Edition, but there are far more expensive options on the table as well. Though we'd struggle to see a reason why you should spend $2,000 on the Asus ROG RTX 4090.
But if you desire a new high-performance graphics card, there is nothing better, and probably won't be for a good while. But don't expect the cards to hang around. They may not disappear as quickly as in previous launches, given the extreme price of them. And there are a host of third-party cards available, too. But I would still expect the first shipment of RTX 4090 cards to sell out soon after launch. Which means it will pay to get in line
Read more on pcgamer.com