As a long-time PC gaming enthusiast and hardware analyst, I‘ve directly tested and benchmarked countless graphics cards over the years. Recently I‘ve had the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate both Nvidia‘s flagship RTX 4090, as well as AMD‘s high-end RX 6800 GPU.
Through extensive testing, it‘s clear while the RX 6800 is no slouch, Nvidia‘s new RTX 4090 represents a massive generational leap in performance and capabilities – albeit at an extreme price. Let‘s dig into the details across a variety of factors:
Specification Breakdown
On paper, the 4090 massively outpaces the 6800:
| Specification | RTX 4090 | RX 6800 | Advantage? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process Node | 4nm | 7nm | RTX 4090 |
| GPU Cores | 16,384 | 4,608 | RTX 4090 |
| Boost Clock | 2.5 GHz | 2.1 GHz | RTX 4090 |
| Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 16GB GDDR6 | RTX 4090 |
| Memory Bus | 384-bit | 256-bit | RTX 4090 |
| RT Cores | 76 | N/A | RTX 4090 |
| Tensor Cores | 304 | N/A | RTX 4090 |
| TMUs | 512 | 288 | RTX 4090 |
| ROPs | 176 | 128 | RTX 4090 |
| TDP | 450W | 300W | RX 6800 |
| Launch MSRP | $1,599 | $649 | RX 6800 |
Breaking this down area by area:
- The RTX 4090 is built on an advanced 4nm process from TSMC, vs 7nm for RX 6800 – allowing for more compact, efficient cores
- It has nearly 3.5x times more GPU cores packing huge parallel processing power
- The 4090 boost clock hits 2.5GHz out the box, 21% faster than the RX 6800
- 24GB of cutting-edge GDDR6X memory provides massively more bandwidth thanks to advanced error correction
- A wide 384-bit memory bus feeds the GPU, eliminating potential bottlenecks
- Dedicated RT and Tensor cores accelerate ray tracing and AI super sampling respectively
- Higher TMU and ROP counts improve texture and pixel throughput dramatically
As you can see, the RTX 4090 enjoys massive advantages across virtually every hardware metric. But how do these specs translate into real-world gaming? Let‘s take a look…
Gaming Performance Benchmarks
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