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4K Gaming Performance
Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We've already tested the RTX 4090 Founders Edition at 1080p, and found that it's generally overkill at such settings. For the AIB cards, we'll focus on the 4K and 1440p performance.
We have both stock and overclocked (and underclocked) results for the ray traced games, while we limited overclocked testing in our standard test suite to the Founders Edition. That's because even at 4K, we start to see other factors limit performance. Across our standard test suite, the overclock on the Founders Edition only improves performance by 4% on average. In our ray tracing suite, the same settings yield an 8.5% improvement.
The MSI 4090 Suprim Liquid X ends up being about 1% faster than the Founders Edition at stock settings, in both the DXR and standard test suites. It's also 1% slower than the Asus ROG Strix card, but we're splitting hairs if we try to make anything of those differences.
Overclocking reveals some interesting bits as well, with the MSI card doing the worst of the three tested 4090 cards. Again, that could be entirely luck of the draw, but we're also not talking major differences as the OC'ed Founders Edition only beats the OC'ed MSI by 1%.
As we've said on numerous occasions, most people are going to be far more interested in cost and aesthetics rather than the potential performance uplift you get from a third-party factory overclocked card. If anything, the 4090 Founders Edition makes the gap between itself and such AIB cards even narrower.
And it doesn't really matter whether you're looking at the overall metric or the individual game results. The spread between the MSI and reference cards ranges from 0% to 1.7%, so all of our testing shows similar potential gains.
1440p Gaming Performance
Dropping the resolution to 1440p doesn't change much in terms of standings. The FPS results are a bit higher on the 4090 cards, though it's not as big of a jump as you see with slower cards. That's because our 12900K CPU is holding back performance a bit, particularly in our standard test suite.
Take the MSI card compared to the RX 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti as an example. At 1440p, overall performance on the MSI 4090 card improves by 27% compared to 4K. Performance on the RX 6950 XT in contrast increases by 65%, while the RTX 3090 Ti performance improves by 51%.
If we check the same improvements in the DXR suite, the MSI 4090 runs 86% faster at the lower resolution. The RX 6950 XT meanwhile more than doubles, by 106%. The 3090 Ti doesn't improve quite that much, but it's also nearly double the performance, with a 95% increase.
Test Setup for MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X
We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022, and we'll continue to use the same hardware for a while longer. AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X and the Core i9-13900K are a bit faster, and those would definitely make more of a difference at 1080p. Still, we're using XMP for a modest boost to performance and the GPU generally becomes the limiting factor at 4K — which is where the 4090 belongs.
Our CPU sits in an MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, with DDR4-3600 memory — a nod to sensibility rather than outright maximum performance. We also upgraded to Windows 11 and are now running the latest 22H2 version (with VBS and HVCI disabled) to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. You can see the rest of the hardware in the boxout.
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