NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE: 2850MHz GPU at stock in Cyberpunk 2077

NVIDIA has shown off its next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card during a recent demo, showing the GPU clocking close to 3.0GHz as Jensen promised.

The new GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card was powered by an Intel Core i9-12900K processor, running CD PROJEKT RED's visual showcase: Cyberpunk 2077. The game was run at 1440p using Ultra Ray Tracing and Psycho settings (maximum).

• Read more: NVIDIA has overclocked next-gen Ada Lovelace 'past 3GHz in our labs'

Cyberpunk 2077 running at the native 2560 x 1440 resolution on the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card -- without DLSS enabled -- was running at 60FPS average. The AD102-300 GPU inside of the RTX 4090 was running at over 2.8GHz during this demo, sitting between 2810MHz and 2850MHz with cool temps of just 50-55C.

• RTX 4090: 2800-2850MHz (stock)
• RTX 4090: 3000MHz+ OC expected
• RTX 3090 Ti: 2000-2050MHz

We know that NVIDIA's new Ada Lovelace GPU has been pushed past 3.0GHz on the GeForce RTX 4090, with NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang teasing that the team has overclocked Ada "past 3GHz in our labs".

What is all that GPU clock speed awesome sauce being put to good use on? Cyberpunk 2077 was used with a pre-release copy of DLSS 3, which means we should expect even better performance in the final version (well, the update that we'll get when CDPR pushes it out, and DLSS 3 is here once RTX 40 series GPUs launch).

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4090 was used with DLSS 3 enabled in Cyberpunk 2077, with performance skyrocketing from 60FPS average at 1440p maxed out, to an almost unbelievable 170.7FPS average (with DLSS 3 set to Quality, not to Performance mode to be specific).

• RTX 4090 no DLSS 3: 60FPS average
• RTX 4090 + DLSS 3: 170FPS average
• RTX 3090 Ti no DLSS 2: 35.8FPS average
• RTX 3090 Ti + DLSS 2: 61.9FPS average

If we compare this to the current-gen GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2 disabled, the RTX 3090 Ti spits out just 35.8FPS average (compared to 60FPS on the RTX 4090) while with DLSS 2 enabled on Quality mode performance bumps up just to 62FPS average.

• Read more: NVIDIA teases Ray Tracing: Overdrive, RTXDI, DLSS 3 for Cyberpunk 2077
• Read more: NVIDIA's next-gen AD102 GPU: 76.3B transistors, up to 18432 CUDA cores
• Read more: NVIDIA details its new GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card

This means the GeForce RTX 4090 provides the same performance as the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at 1440p maxed out, but the RTX 4090 doesn't need DLSS enabled to achieve that. But man, the RTX 4090 really drives some next-gen GPU performance when DLSS 3 is enabled in Cyberpunk 2077.