Leaked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE Render Fans Speculation About Larger Design

Anyone who's done much overclocking will well know that efficient cooling is as much (or more) about the amount of airflow you have as it is the size of your radiator. That holds true for GPUs as well as CPUs, which is why we see graphics cards with massive triple-fan coolers. NVIDIA clearly knows this too, at least if the leaked renders of the next-generation Founders Edition cards are correct.

The cooler is absolutely massive. It has a bracket with three expansion slots' worth of space on the rear, but the cooler itself appears to far outstrip the space afforded by the rear-case brackets. The most notable change from the GeForce RTX 3090's cooler seems to be a larger fan. Doing some pixel peeping and comparing against the size of the expansion slot bracket, it looks like the fan diameter could be a full 120mm.


FCL also shared what they say is an "internal RTX40 graph" that seems to represent RTX performance gains. The graph's data isn't labeled, so we don't know what is being compared with what, but it's a reasonable inference to say that the grey bars are the normalized ("1x") ray-tracing performance of an Ampere-based GeForce card, while the green bars indicate the relative performance of an Ada model.

We specifically mention ray-tracing performance because all of the applications named in the bottom make heavy use of ray-traced effects—particularly Quake II RTX and the three professional renderers, which are all entirely path-traced. The majority of the tests meet or exceed 2x performance.

Real-time ray-traced graphics will only become more commonplace as time goes on, so these results are important. It probably won't be a surprise to anyone that NVIDIA's next-generation parts offer another huge leap in ray-tracing ability. It will be fascinating to see if AMD's RDNA 3 Radeons can keep up, though.