From playable 8K gaming to absolutely jaw-dropping performance in creative workloads, the RTX 3090 can do just about anything with best-in-class performance. Right now, 8K pretty much exclusively exists in the realm of high-end TVs, which means the panels aren't exactly widespread. That will almost certainly change in the coming years, but right now there isn't a single gaming monitor that supports the resolution. 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. It should be noted that the NVENC encoder is the same here as on the RTX 2080 Ti, which means performance doesn't change much generation-to-generation. However, now that this encoder is supported in Adobe Premiere, nearly the entire video production workflow is now accelerated by the GPU, which makes a dedicated GPU incredibly beneficial to video editors. Encoding a video using the NVENC encoder, rather than through software cuts the time in half – even when we're using the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X paired with 64GB of RAM running at 3,600MHz. The games we selected for testing are there to push the GPU to its limits, so we can compare the performance delta between different graphics cards. They provide easily repeatable benchmark scripts, so we can be sure the exact same workload is applied to each graphics card.

Now that we've all been working from home for so long, and with it looking like that's going to become the new normal, anything that makes video conferencing less stressful is a huge benefit. The best part is that this technology is available to anyone with an Nvidia RTX-powered device.

The redesign of the PCB on the RTX 3090 requires a whole new 12-pin power connector. (Image credit: Future)

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. Just like its little sibling, the RTX 3080, the RTX 3090 is built on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, using the full-fat GA102 GPU. This time around, we're getting 82 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), making for a total of 10,496 CUDA cores, along with 328 Tensor cores and 82 RT Cores. 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. 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.Just like the RTX 3080, the Founders Edition of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is hands-down the best cooler design Team Green has ever shipped itself. While this is an absolutely massive graphics card – the thing is 12.3 inches long, is a 3-slot card, and weighs, well a lot. Look, we don't have a scale, and Nvidia doesn't list the weight, but it's easily more than 7 lb. The basic design of the RTX 3090 is similar to other Nvidia Ampere cards, only this card is much bigger. (Image credit: Future) At 4K, however, the RTX 3090 does provide the level of performance where you can just crank every setting up to max and just forget about it. Every single game we tried to play with this graphics card at 4K ran like a dream. Final Fantasy XV with everything turned up? 70+ fps – with the stutter that game is infamous for almost completely eliminated thanks to the 24GB frame buffer. It's strange to give the RTX 3090 credit for its value proposition, given that its such an expensive card, but considering that this is much more of a prosumer/professional card, this is downright cheap for a workstation-class GPU. 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.