Leaked RTX 4090 benchmarks suggest generational leap in performance

The RTX 4090 is almost twice as fast as the RTX 3090, according to the latest leaked benchmarks from industry insiders.

The RTX 4090 is no longer delayed and is now sitting pretty with a release date set for around October. Now, stalwart Twitter leaker Kopite7Kimi has shared a bit more news about Nvidia’s upcoming flagship graphics card.

For those of you scratching your heads, don’t worry. This means that the RTX 4090 achieved a graphics score of over 19,000 in 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme benchmark. For some context, the RTX 3090 manages to scrape by with a score of around 9,900-10,000 in the same test. This generational performance uplift isn’t unheard of, but it definitely paints a good picture of what we should expect performance-wise out of the rest of the RTX 40-series stack, including the RTX 4080 and 4070 cards.

RTX 4090 leaked benchmark

The RTX 4090’s leaked benchmark puts it firmly at being roughly twice as fast as the RTX 3090. However, these are synthetic benchmarks and not reflective of how you might see the card performing in real-world use.

Twitter user and leaker Harukaze5719 got involved with the excitement by posting a performance chart as shown below, which should provide some context for how you should expect the RTX 4090 to perform.

Harukaze5719

This is roughly 82% faster than the original RTX 3090 base models. Considering that this early benchmark is likely completely not tweaked, or not running under optimal conditions, you should probably expect this 19,000 figure to be a baseline benchmark for what you can expect from the system.

However, you should also consider that the RTX 4090 has some pretty extreme power requirements, and if you’re going to want to maintain that level of performance, then you might have to splash out on a really high-wattage power supply to go along with it.

RTX 4090 gaming performance leaks

According to Kopite7Kimi, testing on the “high power-draw” variant of the RTX 4090 began a few weeks ago. Commenting on its power and performance, Kopite7Kimi states that they do not know how to talk about the card due to its multiple variants, and the 8000w Power Draw, which is frankly ludicrous.

They also commented that the cooler for the card is extremely big, seemingly due ot having to deal with that kind of thermal load. In addition to this, a tweet from XpeaGPU reportedly gives us our first look at gaming performance on this behemoth of a card.

160 FPS with Ray Tracing and DLSS turned on at 4k is an incredible result for a game that is known to bring most graphics cards to their knees. However, multiple details are missing like what kind DLSS it is running, which can heavily affect performance. Regardless, a result like this is far beyond any consumer graphics card that you can buy today.

Kopite7Kimi goes further to suggest that an overclocked model of the RTX 4090 will manage to break the 20,000 point mark in time Spy Extreme.

Be sure to take these leaks with a few heaps of salt, considering that the card has not even been announced yet, so it’s possible that this benchmark could be subject to change. Regardless, it looks like Lovelace is going to give the best graphics cards a run for their money. But, if you are looking for slightly less powerful 40-series cards, you might be waiting a little while longer.