Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC Desktop GPU review: High end performance with a price to match

For the following benchmarks and tests we used this system: 

• Lian-Li O11 Dynamic
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
• Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master, BIOS: F8a
• Alphacool Eisbear 360 AiO
• Corsair RM 1000x power supply 
• G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 2x 16 GB, EXPO (DDR5-6000 CL30-38-38-96)
• Corsair MP600 2 TB
• Crucial MX500 2 TB
• Microsoft Windows 11 Professional 64-Bit (Version 22H2)

The synthetic tests already clearly demonstrate what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is capable of. The performance of the current top models is almost completely pulverized and in the overall synthetic benchmark rating the Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC outperforms the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti by 52 percent. The previous top model from AMD (AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT) finds itself further back in the pack and takes fourth place behind the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition.

The Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC performs very well not only in synthetic benchmarks but in gaming tests as well. Gains of as much as 50 to 60 percent are a piece of cake to this monster of a graphics card. Although AMD lags far behind here, the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is already in the starting blocks.

For a fair comparison, we have also tested the Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC with the Intel Core i9-13900K. Here it is possible to extract a little more performance from the graphics card. Once more, this confirms that Intel's Core i9-13900K currently offers the fastest gaming CPU solution. The performance when paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is nothing to sneeze at. However, if the goal is to squeeze every last frame per second from the graphics card, there's currently no getting around an Intel platform. A 4K display should be used due to the enormous power of the Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC. Even at this high resolution, we sometimes reached the CPU's limits which somewhat slows down the GPU. Currently, there are only a few games, for example Cyberpunk 2077, F1 2022 or The Quarry which really make the GeForce RTX 4090 break sweat in 4K. With features such as DLSS this can be counteracted so that three digit frame rates can also be achieved here. We determined all benchmark results using Nvidia's DLSS.

The new DLSS 3.0 which is based on DLSS 2.0 and is expanded with the Frame Generation (FG) feature set, drastically helps increase frame rates. THe most famous game to benefit from this is Cyberpunk 2077. In native 4K resolution and the Ray Tracing Ultra Preset even the GeForce RTX 4090 hovers around an average of only 43 frames per second. By activating DLSS over 100 frames per second are possible which nearly triples the performance. DLSS 3.0 relies on the fourth generation Tensor Core which is currently only used in the RTX 4000 series. A list of games which either already support DLSS 3.0 or will be supported with this feature in future can be found here: