NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition (24GB)

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition remains one of the most capable GPUs you can buy — the Ada Lovelace flagship that redefined what a single-card gaming and creative rig could do, and a card that still holds its own against everything short of NVIDIA’s newest Blackwell generation. For gamers who want maxed-out 4K performance, creators pushing 8K video and huge 3D scenes, and enthusiasts running local AI models, the RTX 4090 continues to deliver flagship-class results at a price that has become considerably more accessible.

Key Features

• 16,384 CUDA Cores — massive parallel compute built on a custom TSMC 4N process, still enough to lead every non-Blackwell GPU on the market in raw shader throughput.
• 24GB GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus — running at 21Gbps for over 1TB/s of memory bandwidth, comfortably handling 4K/8K textures, large open-world scenes, and local AI models up to the mid-teens in billions of parameters.
• 72MB L2 cache — a large on-die cache that reduces memory-bound stalls in both games and compute workloads.
• 512 fourth-generation Tensor Cores — up to 1,321 AI TOPS, driving DLSS 3 Frame Generation and strong local inference performance for Stable Diffusion, LLMs, and other generative AI workloads.
• 128 third-generation RT Cores — up to 191 TFLOPS of ray tracing performance for fully path-traced titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2.
• 82.6 TFLOPS FP32 shader compute — a substantial generational gain over the previous RTX 30-series flagship, still highly competitive today.
• 2.52GHz boost clock — high out-of-the-box clocks with strong overclocking headroom on partner and Founders Edition boards alike.
• AV1 hardware encode and decode — efficient, high-quality hardware video encoding that cuts export times and improves streaming quality versus older codecs.

Still a Flagship for Gaming, Creation, and Local AI

Two-plus years after launch, the RTX 4090 remains the card of choice for anyone who wants uncompromising 4K gaming without stepping up to Blackwell pricing. At native 4K with ray tracing enabled, it comfortably delivers high, stable frame rates in the most demanding current titles, and DLSS 3 Frame Generation extends that lead further in supported games. For high-refresh 1440p gaming it has more headroom than most displays can even use, which means this card ages gracefully as games get heavier rather than becoming a bottleneck within a generation.

For content creators, the 24GB frame buffer and 1TB/s+ of bandwidth make the RTX 4090 a genuine production tool rather than just a gaming card: 8K video editing, dense Blender and Unreal Engine scenes, and multi-layer compositing all fit and run smoothly, while the NVENC AV1 encoder significantly speeds up exports and live streaming versus CPU-based encoding or older hardware encoders. For local AI experimentation, 24GB is enough to comfortably run Stable Diffusion and similar image models at full speed, and to run inference on quantized LLMs in the 13B–34B parameter range without exotic offloading tricks — a genuinely useful entry point into local generative AI that doesn’t require a dedicated workstation GPU.

The Founders Edition specifically brings NVIDIA’s own dual-axial-flow cooler and vapor chamber design — a compact, well-engineered thermal solution that keeps the 450W TDP in check without the bulk of some triple-slot partner cards, while still leaving headroom for the transient power spikes (up to 600W) that Ada Lovelace’s flagship is known for. Pair it with an 850W-or-better power supply and a case with decent airflow, and you get a card that, even now, only NVIDIA’s newest Blackwell flagships can outrun.

Specifications

• Architecture: NVIDIA Ada Lovelace, TSMC 4N
• CUDA Cores: 16,384
• Tensor Cores: 512 (4th-generation)
• RT Cores: 128 (3rd-generation)
• Memory: 24GB GDDR6X, 384-bit bus, 21Gbps, 72MB L2 cache
• Memory Bandwidth: ~1,008GB/s
• FP32 Compute: 82.6 TFLOPS
• AI Performance: Up to 1,321 AI TOPS
• Boost Clock: 2.52GHz
• Total Graphics Power: 450W (transient spikes up to 600W)
• Interface: PCIe 4.0 x16
• Display Outputs: DisplayPort 1.4a, HDMI 2.1a
• Recommended PSU: 850W
• Launch: October 2022, original MSRP $1,599