When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 was introduced with an eye-watering $1,600 price ticket, memes unfold like wildfire. While $1,600 is just a little an excessive amount of for many players to spend on a single element (most PC construct budgets I see are lower than that for the entire PC). I couldn’t assist however be intrigued on the potential efficiency enhancements for my work—you understand, the 3D and AI-accelerated duties I spend most of my day doing as a part of managing the EposVox YouTube channel, as an alternative of gaming.
Spoiler alert: The GeForce RTX 4090’s content material creation efficiency is magical. In fairly a number of instances, the usually nonsense “2X performance increase” is definitely true. But not in all places.
Let’s dig in.
Our check setup
Most of my benchmarking was carried out on this check bench:
- Intel Core i9-12900okay CPU
- 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5200MT/s RAM
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E Gaming Wifi Motherboard
- EVGA G3 850W PSU
- Source information saved on a PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSD
My aims have been to see how a lot of an improve the RTX 4090 can be over the earlier technology GeForce RTX 3090, in addition to the RTX Titan (the cardboard I used to be primarily engaged on earlier than). The RTX 3090 actually noticed minimal enhancements over the RTX Titan for my use instances, so I wasn’t certain if the 4090 would actually be an enormous leap. For some extra hardcore testing later as I’ll point out, testing was completed on this check bench.
- AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX CPU
- 256GB Kingston ECC DDR4 RAM
- ASUS WRX80 SAGE Motherboard
- BeQuiet 1400W PSU
- Source information saved on a PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSD
Each check featured every GPU in the identical config as to not combine outcomes.
Video manufacturing
My day job is, in fact, creating YouTube content material, so one of many first issues I needed to check can be the advantages I’d see for creating video content material. Using PugetBench from the workstation builders at Puget Systems, Adobe Premiere Pro sees very minimal efficiency enchancment with the RTX 4090 (as to be anticipated at this level).
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve, nevertheless, noticed important efficiency enhancements throughout the board over each the RTX 3090 and RTX Titan. This is smart, as Resolve is way extra optimized for GPU workflows than Premiere Pro. Renders have been a lot sooner thanks each to the upper 3D compute on results, but in addition the sooner encoding {hardware} onboard—and the final playback and workflow was rather more “snappier” feeling and responsive.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
I’ve been enhancing with the GeForce RTX 4090 for a number of weeks now, and the expertise has been nice—although I needed to revert again to the general public launch of Resolve so I haven’t been capable of export utilizing the AV1 encoder for many of my movies.
Adam Taylor/IDG
I additionally wished to check to see if the AI {hardware} enhancements would profit Resolve’s Magic Mask device for rotoscoping, or their face tracker for the Face Refinement plugin. Admittedly, I hoped to see extra enhancements from the RTX 4090 right here, however there’s an enchancment, which saves me time and is a win. These duties are tedious and sluggish, so any minutes I can shave off makes my life simpler. Perhaps in time extra optimization could be completed particular to the brand new structure modifications in Lovelace (the RTX 40-series’ underlying GPU structure codename).
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
The efficiency in my unique Resolve benchmarks impressed me sufficient that I made a decision to construct a second-tier check utilizing my Threadripper Pro workstation; rendering and exporting a 8K video with 8K RAW supply footage, a lot of results and Super Scale (Resolve’s inner “smart” upscaler) on 4K footage, and so forth. This challenge isn’t any joke, the traditional high-tier gaming playing cards simply errored out as a result of their decrease VRAM portions couldn’t deal with the challenge— this bumps the RTX 3060, 2080, and 3080 out of the operating. But placing the 24GB VRAM monsters to the check, the RTX 4090 exported the tasks an entire 8 minutes sooner than the check. Eight minutes. That form of time scaling is sport altering for single individual workflows like mine.
Adam Taylor/IDG
If you’re a excessive res or effect-heavy video editor, the RTX 4090 is already going to save lots of you hours of ready and slower working, proper out of the gate and we haven’t even talked about encoding speeds but.
Video encoding
For merely transcoding video in H.264 and H.265, the GeForce RTX 4090 additionally simply runs laps round earlier Nvidia GPUs. H.265 is the one space the place AMD out-performs Nvidia in encoder pace (although not essentially high quality) as ever for the reason that Radeon 5000 GPUs, AMD’s HEVC encoder has been blazing quick.
Adam Taylor/IDG
The new Ada Lovelace structure additionally comes with new twin encoder chips that individually already run a good bit sooner for H.264 and H.265 encoding than Ampere and Turing, however additionally they encode AV1—the brand new, open-source video codec from the Alliance for Open Media.
Adam Taylor/IDG
AV1 is the way forward for web-streamed video, with most main firms concerned in media streaming additionally being members of the consortium. The objective is to create a extremely environment friendly (as in, higher high quality per bit) video codec that may meet the wants of the trendy excessive decision, excessive body price, and HDR streaming world, whereas avoiding the excessive licensing and patent prices related to H.265 (HEVC) and H.266 codecs. Intel was first to market with {hardware} AV1 encoders with their Arc GPUs as I covered for PCWorld here—now Nvidia brings it to their GPUs.
I can’t get utterly correct high quality comparisons between Intel and Nvidia’s AV1 encoders but as a consequence of restricted software program help. From the essential exams I may do, Nvidia’s AV1 encodes are on par with Intel’s—however I’ve since discovered that the encoder implementations in even the software program I can use them in each may use some fine-tuning to finest characterize either side.
Performance-wise, AV1 performs about as quick as H.265/HEVC on the RTX 4090. Which is okay. But the brand new twin encoder chips enable each H.265 and AV1 for use to encode 8K60 video, or simply sooner 4K60 video. They do that by splitting up the video frames into horizontal halves, encoding the halves on the separate chips, after which stitching again collectively earlier than finalizing the stream. This seems like how Intel’s Hyper Encode was purported to work—Hyper Encoder as an alternative separating GOPs (Group of Pictures or frames) among the many iGPU and dGPU with Arc—however in all of my exams, I solely discovered Hyper Encode to decelerate the method, relatively than rushing it up. (Plus it didn’t work with AV1.)
Streaming
As a results of the aforementioned enhancements in encoder pace, streaming and recording your display, digital camera, or gameplay is a far, much better expertise. This comes with an replace to the NVENC encoder SDK inside OBS Studio, now presenting customers with 7 presets (akin to X264’s “CPU Usage Presets”) scaling from P1 being the quickest/lowest high quality to P7 being the slowest/very best quality. In my testing on this video, P6 and P7 have been principally the very same end result on RTX 2000, 3000, and 4000 GPUs, and competed with X264 VerySlow in high quality.
While sport streaming, I noticed largely the identical efficiency recording as different GPUs in Spider-Man Remastered (although different video games will see extra advantages) with H.264, however then encoding with AV1… had negligible affect on sport efficiency in any respect. It was just about clear. You wouldn’t even know you have been recording, even on the very best high quality preset. I even had sufficient headroom to set OBS to an 8K canvas and upscale my 1440p sport seize to 8k inside OBS and report utilizing the twin encoder chips, and nonetheless not see a big affect.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Unfortunately, whereas Nvidia’s Shadowplay function does get 8K60 help on Lovelace through the twin encoders, solely HEVC is supported at the moment. Hopefully AV1 could be applied—and supported for all resolutions, as HEVC solely works for 8K or HDR as is—quickly.
I additionally discovered that the GeForce RTX 4090 is now quick sufficient to do utterly lossless 4:4:4 HEVC recording at 4K 60FPS—one thing prior generations merely can’t do. 4:4:4 chroma subsampling is necessary for sustaining textual content readability and for protecting the picture intact when zooming in on small parts like I do for movies, and at 4K it’s form of been a “white whale” of mine, because the throughput on RTX 2000/3000 hasn’t been sufficient or the OBS implementation of 4:4:4 isn’t optimized sufficient. Unfortunately 4:4:4 isn’t attainable in AV1 on these playing cards, in any respect.
Photo enhancing
Photo enhancing sees just about zero enchancment on the GeForce RTX 4090. There’s a slight rating enhance on the Adobe Photoshop PugetBench exams versus earlier generations, however nothing price shopping for a brand new card over.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
Same goes for Lightroom Classic. Shame.
Adam Taylor/IDG
But should you’re an Affinity Photo consumer, the RTX 4090 far outperforms different GPUs, I’m undecided whether or not to interpret that Affinity is kind of optimized on this case.
A.I.
AI is all the fashion today, and AI upscalers are in excessive demand proper now. Theoretically, the GeForce RTX 4090’s improved AI {hardware} would profit these workflows—and we largely see this ring true. The RTX 4090 tops the charts for quickest upscaling in Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI and Gigapixel, in addition to ON1 Resize AI 2022.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
But Topaz’s new PhotoAI app sees weirdly low efficiency in all Nvidia playing cards. I’ve been advised this can be a bug, however a repair has but to be distributed.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Using FlowFrames to AI interpolate 60FPS footage to 120FPS for slow-mo utilization, the RTX 4090 sees a 20 % speed-up in comparison with the RTX 4090. This is good as it’s, however I’ve been advised by customers within the FlowFrames Discord server that this might theoretically scale extra as optimizations for Lovelace are developed.
Adam Taylor/IDG
What about producing AI Art? I examined N00mkrad’s Stable Diffusion GUI and located that the GeForce RTX 4090 blew away all earlier GPUs in each half and full-precision technology—and as soon as once more have been advised the outcomes “should be” greater, even. Exciting instances.
Adam Taylor/IDG
3D rendering
Alright, the daring “2X Faster” claims are right here. I wished to check 3D workflows on my Threadripper Pro rig, since I’ve been getting increasingly more into these new instruments in 2022.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Adam Taylor/IDG
Testing Blender, each the Monster and Classroom benchmark scenes have the RTX 4090 rendering twice as quick because the RTX 3090, with the Junkshop scene rendering simply shy of 2X sooner.
Adam Taylor/IDG
This interprets not solely to sooner last renders—which at scale is completely huge—however a a lot smoother artistic course of as all the precise preview/viewport work can be extra fluid and responsive, too, and you may extra simply preview the ultimate outcomes with out ready endlessly.
Adam Taylor/IDG
Benchmarking Octane—a renderer utilized by 3D artists and VFX creators in Cinema4D, Blender, and Unity—once more has the RTX 4090 operating twice as quick because the RTX 3090.
Adam Taylor/IDG
…and once more, the identical goes for V-Ray in each CUDA and RTX workflows.
Bottom line: The GeForce RTX 4090 provides excellent worth to content material creators
That’s the place the worth is. The Titan RTX was $2,500, and it was already phenomenal to get that efficiency for $1,500 with the RTX 3090. Now for $100 extra, the GeForce RTX 4090 runs laps round prior GPUs in ways in which have really game-changing impacts on workflows for creators of all types.
This would possibly clarify why the formerly-known-as-Quadro line of playing cards acquired far much less emphasis over the previous few years, too. Why purchase a $5,000+ graphics card when you may get the identical efficiency (or extra, Quadros have been by no means tremendous quick, they simply had a lot of VRAM) for $1,600?
Obviously the pricing of the $1,200 RTX 4080 and recently un-launched $899 4080 12GB can nonetheless be regarding till we see impartial testing numbers, however the GeForce RTX 4090 would possibly simply be the primary time advertising and marketing has boasted of “2x faster” efficiency on a product and I really feel like I’ve truly acquired that promise. Especially for outcomes inside my area of interest work pursuits as an alternative of mainstream instruments or gaming? This is superior.
Pure players in all probability shouldn’t spend $1,600 on a graphics card, except feeding a excessive refresh price 4K monitor with no compromises is a objective. But should you’re taken with getting actual, nitty-gritty content material creation work completed quick, the GeForce RTX 4090 can’t be beat—and it’ll make you grin from ear to ear throughout any late-night Call of Duty periods you hop into, as properly.