You'll need an adapter to get power to the 12-pin connector on the RTX 3090, but fortunately it comes with the card. (Image credit: Future) But where the RTX 3090 really shines is in 3D Rendering through applications like Blender and Autodesk Maya. In fact, while in games the RTX 3090 is around 50% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, the 3090 is nearly twice as fast as the Turing flagship in Blender, rendering through the benchmark in just 229 seconds to the RTX 2080 Ti's 438 seconds. That's a 91% improvement, thanks in large part to the sheer amount of VRAM and FP32 performance on offer here. When it comes to gaming performance, we're going to just come out and say it – the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is just 10-20% faster than the RTX 3080 at more than double the price. That increase in performance, if all you're looking for is a gaming card, is absolutely not worth it, and that's ok. The RTX 3090 is an impressively huge graphics card, thanks in large part to its incredible cooling solution that keeps this powerful GPU running at a safe temperature, but that does mean that a lot of cases won't be able to fit it.

Nvidia's impressive Ampere architecture is on full display with the RTX 3090, featuring over 10,000 CUDA cores, second generation RT cores, and third generation Tensor cores to accelerate machine learning tasks. Credit is provided by Novuna Personal Finance, a trading style of Mitsubishi HC Capital (UK) PLC, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Financial Services Register no. 704348. The register can be accessed through http://www.fca.org.ukFrom playable 8K gaming to absolutely jaw-dropping performance in creative workloads, the RTX 3090 can do just about anything with best-in-class performance.

It is a bit unsightly, however, and it's hard to have the same kind of clean cable setup as you would have otherwise. However, third-party graphics card manufacturers are using the same 8-pin power connector as always, so you can always just go with one of those if you need to. Given the present market and the previous generation of professional-grade graphics cards, the RTX 3090 exists in kind of a middle ground. The GeForce name suggests that this graphics card is aimed at gamers, but the specs and pricing suggest that it's more geared towards prosumers that need raw rendering power, but aren't quite ready to jump into the Nvidia Quadro and Tesla worlds.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

But you can bet your bottom dollar that we threw this graphics card into our personal machine and tried it across a wide spectrum of PC games, both at 4K and 8K DSR to see how it performs. These Tensor Cores do more than just power DLSS, however. They're also the technology that enables Nvidia Broadcast, which is by far one of the most underrated features released for this generation. While there are going to be some elite gamers out there who are going to buy this card more for status than performance, this is much more of a creative professional's graphics card. As such, it does for professional workloads what the RTX 3080 does for 4K gaming at a compelling price (relatively), making this the best graphics card for creative professionals. Where the RTX 3090 really shines, however, is in 3D Rendering and encoding, making it hugely compelling to creative professionals that need this level of performance without investing thousands of dollars in a Quadro or Tesla card.

I upgraded from a zotac 2080 Ti to this card and the difference despite only being a generation apart is huge. All of my games run smoother, the more intensive games I can run at even higher quality, and some weird compatibility issues with the zotac card are gone. This card just works and it works incredibly well. This comes with a sizable 3-5% performance loss, but otherwise provides a good glimpse at what 8K gaming performance looks like. As you may be able to discern from the charts above, the RTX 3090 doesn't provide the straight 8K 60 fps experience in the most demanding games on PC. But like most things, it's complicated.Requirement is made based on PC configured with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor. A lower power rating may work depending on system configuration.

As we mentioned in our RTX 3080 review, both the Tensor cores and RT cores that Nvidia has made such a huge deal of these past couple graphics card generations see big improvements, too. Namely, throughput of RT cores has doubled with the second-generation ones present on RTX 3000 series cards.The basic design of the RTX 3090 is similar to other Nvidia Ampere cards, only this card is much bigger. (Image credit: Future)