NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Demoed In Cyberpunk 2077: 2x Boost With DLSS 3, 2.85 GHz Clocks at Stock, Temps Around 50C & Reduced Wattage
The demo shown was using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card which we detailed fully over here. The card was paired with an Intel Core i9-12900K system and was running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p using Ultra Ray Tracing and Psycho settings (or maximum settings). At its native resolution, without DLSS and Reflex, the game ran at an average of 59 FPS (49 FPS 1% Lows) while looking at a fixed frame & a latency of 72-75ms. At these settings, the GPU was running over 2.8 GHz, averaging around 2810-2850 MHz (min/max), and with a 100% utilization, the temperatures kept steady between 50-55C. That’s a difference of up to 330 MHz versus the reference boost clock of 2520 MHz (+13% increase) and the impressive part is that no overclocking was involved! This was all happening at stock. This is just one game & we can see even higher clock speeds in other games. The card has since been reported to run over 3 GHz with overclocking. But now we have to talk about the performance with DLSS 3 enabled. The game was using a pre-release version of DLSS 3 so performance and settings will vary in the final version. As soon as the DLSS 3 setting is toggled on, the DLSS Frame Generation setting is also enabled. This was using the “Quality” preset and we once again saw full GPU utilization with over 2.8 GHz clocks but the temps were closer to 50C than 55C this time around (keep this in mind). The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 got a performance boost to 170 FPS on average (119 FPS 1% Lows) with DLSS 3 enabled & an average latency of 53.00ms. That’s an improvement of 2x in FPS and 30% in latency reduction versus DLSS disabled. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 in Cyberpunk 2077 (DLSS 3 Disabled): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 in Cyberpunk 2077 (DLSS 3 Enabled): But that’s not all, using the latest PCAT tool which comes with support for the PCIe 5.0 16-Pin (12VPHWR) power plug, NVIDIA also provided the wattage figures with both, DLSS disabled and enabled. With DLSS 3 disabled, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card consumed 461 Watts on average with a performance per watt (Frames/Joule) of 0.135 points. As soon as DLSS 3 was enabled, the GPU saw the wattage drop to 348W or a 25% reduction. This also increased the perf per watt to 0.513, an increase of 3.8x.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Cyberpunk 2077 Demo
Update: We also have performance results added from our GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS enabled and disabled. We are running a custom MSI SUPRIM X design which features a higher factory OC so performance should be slightly better than the FE variant. The card at stock scored an average 37.2 FPS at native 1440p under the same settings and same scene. The card consumed 452W power & is seen running around 75C. With DLSS 2 “Quality” enabled, we saw a boost to 61 FPS (+64% increase) and the power draw also drops to 409W (-10% decrease). Following is the result. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultra Quality + Psycho RT (Native 1440p):
MSI RTX 3090 TI SUPRIM X (Stock Native 1440p) - 37 FPS / 455W Power / ~75C NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE (Stock Native 1440p) - 60 FPS / 461W Power / ~55C RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti = +62% Faster
Cyberpunk 2077 Ultra Quality + Psycho RT (DLSS 1440p):
MSI RTX 3090 Ti SUPRIM X (DLSS 2 1440p) - 61 FPS / 409W Power / 74C NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE (DLSS 3 1440p) - 170 FPS / 348W Power / ~50C RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti = +178% Faster
The power numbers are a seriously big deal and one reason why this may be happening is that the load of the FP32 cores is moved to the tensor cores which run the DLSS algorithms. These cores are specialized at these talks and rather than brute-forcing the whole GPU which results in a higher power draw, the tensor cores can process the data much faster and more efficiently while leading to lower power consumption. DLSS 3 can be a game changer in power efficiency and performance efficiency and we really can’t wait to test this out for ourselves when we get our review samples.
