GeForce RTX 4090 Breaks Cover At An Amazing 3.2GHz Core Clock, Shreds PUBG At 330 FPS
Everyone expects the GeForce RTX 4090 to be the fastest graphics card on the planet when it officially debuts this week. Of course, some folks won't be satisfied that easily. Like overclockers, who will propel the card to never-before-seen performance levels. Actually, they're already doing that: overclocker and leaker wxnod has taken his GeForce RTX 4090 card to some 3.24 GHz and used it to destroy PUBG at 4K resolution.
Actually, he claims to have overclocked the card even further than that. A cryptic tweet today says "RTX 4090 1.2v 800 3.5g🤔". That would be 1.2 volts core, 800 watts power draw, and 3.5 GHz. The emoji may indicate that he's only contemplating such a thing, but the power draw seems off to us given his already-achieved results.
Those results come in the form of GPU-Z screenshots displaying the card in various states. The first shot, partially reproduced above, shows the card running 2730 MHz under a 97% load and drawing 446.9 watts while doing so. This is stock performance, and the GPU stays cool at a maximum temperature of 73.4°C despite the low 1652 RPM fan speed, which is 40% of the maximum. The next shot is the more interesting one.
Click on this to see the full image. Source: wxnod on Twitter.
This screenshot displays the RTX 4090 idling after a benchmark or stress test—note the tiny green text indicating that certain settings are showing minimum or maximum values. The GPU clock during the test apparently hit 3,135 MHz, and the minimum temperature shows that this was done without using LN2 cooling. Furthermore, the board power draw (visible in the full image) peaked at 492.8 watts—an extra fifty watts for another 400 MHz of GPU clock over the stock speed.
While that sounds bad when you put it that way, that's only about 10% more power for 15% more clock speed, which means it's probably an efficiency gain—at least, if those clock and power numbers hold up under a heavy load. There's no guarantee of that, though; behavior in benchmarks rarely carries over to real-world workloads.
Early this morning, wxnod tweeted again, with a new screenshot, reproduced above. That 3.24 GHz GPU clock is impressive, but the more interesting part of this screenshot is the memory overclock. 1562.7 MHz translates to a GPU memory data rate of 25 Gbps for GDDR6X.
That's a 4-Gbps gain over the stock 21 Gbps memory speed, and faster even than the rumored 24 Gbps data rate. That would give the card some 1.2 TB/s—yes, that's terabytes-per-second—of memory bandwidth. That's higher memory bandwidth than you'll find on most GPUs equipped with HBM.
The overclocker didn't leave this performance rotting on the vine. Testing in PUBG, he posted up the above screenshot showing the card hitting some 330 FPS average in PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds. That doesn't sound impressive until you realize that the card is doing it in native 4K resolution, without upscaling or frame generation.
Pay no mind to the "RTX 3090TI SPUER PRO MAX PLUS" label; there's no way anything but a 4090 is hitting 3.1 GHz at "just" 555 watts. The world record for an RTX 3090 Ti is around 3 GHz, and that required LN2 cooling. It's not like wxnod is aiming at the sky to produce an unrealistic framerate, either; the shown 1% low framerate is 243 FPS and you can clearly see a distant hilltop in his scope even in the cropped screenshot.
These kinds of overclocking results lend some credence to rumors that the card could scale upward for hundreds of watts. Indeed, leather jacket aficionado (and NVIDIA CEO) Jensen Huang said during the reveal of the cards that the company had overclocked Ada quite high in its labs. Hopefully the majority of the cards clock as well as wxnod's sample.
