The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 doesn’t arrive until later this week, but an early review has suggested that it might only just outperform the RTX 3080.
The review comes courtesy of Chinese publication TecLab, which tested the RTX 3090 in a setup comprising an Intel Core i9-10900K, a 1TB M.2 SSD and 32GB of DDR4 memory clocked at 4,133 MHz.
While recently-shared benchmarks showed the $1,499 RTX 3090 with a 20% lead over the $699 RTX 3080, TecLab’s scores suggest that Nvidia’s top-end Ampere GPU might not be as powerful as we first thought, nor as powerful as early benchmarks suggested.
As shown by data compiled from the now-deleted review by Videocardz, the RTX 3090 outperforms the RTX 3080 by roughly 10% across 16 tests.
In 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme, for example, the RTX 3090 scores 9940, a 10.5% increase over the RTX 3080, but in titles such as Rainbow Six Weight and Forza Horizon it outperforms its more affordable sibling by just 5.8% and 4.7%, respectively.
The biggest gains were seen in Death Stranding (with DLSS switched off) where the RTX 3090 performed 11.5% faster than the RTX 3080.
These scores are somewhat disappointing, especially when you consider the major price difference between the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080.
However, with the RTX 3090 seemingly not delivering the levels of performance that Nvidia has promised, it’s likely the GPU is being bottlenecked by software. If that’s the case, we’ll hopefully see some performance improvements once the card is officially released.
The Nvidia RTX 3090 goes on sale September 24, priced at $1,499 (£1,399, around AU$2,030).