ASUS RTX 4090 ROG Strix Review

ASUS RTX 4090 ROG Strix Review

Conclusion

If you’ve been following along with our coverage of the latest in the Nvidia range of graphics cards, the RTX 4090, then the performance capabilities of the ASUS ROG Strix should come as no surprise. Nvidia already had a fairly dominant lead over the competition in games that support ray tracing, and the newest iteration of their RT and Tensor cores further the gap to incredible levels. Even if you’d just splashed out on the RTX 3090 Ti then the RTX 4090 will still make absolute mincemeat out of it. Whilst ray tracing might be the next big thing, it’s still as performance heavy as 8x MSAA was when anti-aliasing first made its splash in the gaming world, but the RTX 4090, whatever you may think of the cost, shows that smooth ray traced games is possible today, and might be the norm in the not-too-distant future. It’s jaw-droppingly impressive.

That isn’t the only benefit that the newest Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture brings to the party. Besides reminding us of the genius 2DGoggles comic, Nvidia have boosted the performance of DLSS with the third iteration of it. It’s fairly impressive, but what truly moves performance on a step so big that Neil Armstrong might speak of it, is the Frame Generation tech. Only a few games are supported so far but in those that are you can see the difference. An extra 60 FPS average @ 4K in F1 2022, and 40 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at the same resolution above mere DLSS 3. It’s that impressive, and without compromising image quality either. Nvidia recommend performance mode for the DLSS but we run in balanced, because you’re not spending 2K on a GPU only to turn your eye candy into eye chalk.

As for the ASUS RTX 4090 ROG Strix itself, the card redesign is something we like a lot. The ‘all black with RGB’ idea is perfectly fine and dandy, but sometimes it can be a bit wearisome. By moving to the popular streaming colours of blue and red – and thus also pink and purple – the Strix looks classy and cutting edge. The card is nicely rounded too, despite the girth and length being at the very upper limit of what any case can handle, let alone mid-towers. We enjoy the extra HDMI port in the output selection when compared to the regular Nvidia card, although for this money we’d have loved ASUS to push the boat out and give us a triple slot bracket to keep it more firmly screwed in to our case. At least they’ve given us a simple card stand, not that drooping is an issue thanks to the excellent build quality we’d expect from anything with the ROG branding.

Performance might not match the MSI Suprim X, but it’s very close across the board between any and all of our RTX 4090s. Given that many people are brand loyal to a fault, and the Strix is about as popular as any brand can be, all it needed to be was exactly as good as you hoped. With excellent temperatures, attractive looks and gobs of performance the ASUS RTX 4090 ROG Strix meets all our demands and wins our OC3D Performance Award.

There is a fair ASUS Tax though, at an MSRP of £2249.

ASUS RTX 4090 ROG Strix Review  

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