Graphics cards/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
NVIDIA · GeForce RTX 40 · Desktop
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace (AD102-300) desktop graphics card with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, 16,384 shading units and a boost clock of 2520 MHz.
Photo: Benlisquare · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Overview
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace (AD102-300) desktop graphics card with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, 16,384 shading units and a boost clock of 2520 MHz. These are the manufacturer’s published figures. They describe what the chip is designed to do, not what your particular machine does with it, and the gap between those two is usually cooling. A boost clock is a ceiling rather than a promise, and how long a graphics card holds it under continuous load is the one thing no specification sheet can tell you.
Specifications
- Architecture
- Ada Lovelace (AD102-300)
- Shading units
- 16,384
- Base clock
- 2230 MHz
- Boost clock
- 2520 MHz
- Memory
- 24 GB
- Memory type
- GDDR6X
- Memory bus
- 384-bit
- TDP
- 450 W
- Process
- 5 nm
- Launched
- 2022-10-12
Comparable within an architecture. Across vendors or generations it is not a like-for-like count.
Board power, not measured draw. A laptop GPU's power is a range the laptop maker chooses within.
Sources
Each figure, the label its source printed beside it, and the day it was read.
| Figure | As printed | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shading units16,384 | NVIDIA CUDA Cores | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Base clock2230 MHz | Base Clock (GHz) | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Boost clock2520 MHz | Boost Clock (GHz) | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory24 GB | Standard Memory Config | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory typeGDDR6X | Standard Memory Config | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory bus384-bit | Memory Interface Width | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| TDP450 W | Total Graphics Power (W) | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Launched2022-10-12 | The GeForce RTX 4090 is available now | nvidia.comLaunch release |
Architecture, Process: recorded from en.wikipedia.org before each figure carried its own source. The maker's page does not print them in this form, so they do not count as verified.
Measured on SystemCheck: not enough runs yet. Run the test to add yours.
Compare
The 6 nearest graphics cards in the same segment, each with a published side-by-side.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
Other graphics cards in NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40
What these numbers mean
Every figure on this sheet is a design target. None of it is a measurement.
Nothing above describes how a graphics card behaves twenty minutes into a sustained workload, which is where two chips with nearly identical specifications routinely diverge. A boost clock is a ceiling the vendor permits, not a rate the chip sustains, and whether it holds depends on the cooling, the case, the power profile and the room. None of those appear on a specification sheet.
We deliberately do not reduce these figures to a single score. A composite invented from specifications would look authoritative and measure nothing, and choosing the weights would be choosing the winner.