After wrapping up our take on the Intel Arc A700 series, we went right back to testing a GPU that we've had for a few days now: the Nvidia RTX 4090.

This beast of a GPU, provided by Nvidia to Ars Technica for review purposes, is priced well out of the average consumer range, even for a product category where the average price keeps creeping upward.

On paper, the Nvidia RTX 4090 is poised to blow past its Nvidia predecessors, with specs that handily surpass early 2022's overkill RTX 3090 Ti product.

The 4090 comes packed with approximately 50 percent more CUDA cores and between 25 and 33 percent higher counts in other significant categories, particularly cores dedicated to tensor and ray-tracing calculations (which are also updated to new specs for Nvidia's new 5 nm process).

Yet despite surpassing the 3090 Ti in many performance-impacting specs, Nvidia is sticking to a power maximum of 450 W—still a power-hungry card, certainly, but the results may push a new level of efficiency for such a high-end product.

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