NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Review

3DMark Tests Galore!

3DMark Time Spy has been our primary DirectX 12 benchmark test for gaming PCs running Windows 10 for years. This DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 benchmark utilizes a pure DirectX 12 game engine that supports features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading! The developers opted to use DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 to ensure wide compatibility with DirectX 11 hardware through DirectX 12 drivers.

We ran 3DMark Time Spy with the standard settings and got the following results:

3DMark Time Spy shows the GeForce RTX 3090 FE is about 13% faster than the RTX 3080 FE and 68% faster than the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition.

3DMark Port Royal entered the market in 2019 as the worlds first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers. We’ve never included this benchmark before, but now that NVIDIA has more than one generation of cards on the market that have hardware support for real-time ray tracing performance, it was time to include it in our testing. We ran the default test without the demo.

The results were impressive as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 was 18% faster than the RTX 3080 and 51% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti in Port Royal! It also happens to be nearly 12x faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 that just happened to be one of the most sold GeForce GTX 10-series cards.

The Variable-Rate Shading (VRS) Benchmark feature test in 3DMark got updated at the end of 2019 and now includes a Tier 2. Tier 2 adds more flexibility and control by allowing different shading rates within each draw call. Right now this test will only run on NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs.

We saw nearly an 11% performance improvement with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 FE over the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE with VRS on. With the feature turned off, the RTX 3090 enjoyed a slightly larger lead that was just shy of 14%.

Another new benchmark added by UL to 3DMark in 2019 was the NVIDIA DLSS feature test. This new test helps you compare performance and image quality with and without DLSS processing. The test is based on the 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark that uses Temporal Anti-Aliasing. TAA usage can result in blurring and the loss of fine detail and that can be regained by the NVIDIA RTX technology called DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). DLSS uses deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality.

With DLSS turned on the GeForce RTX 3090 was nearly 18% faster than the RTX 3080!