A team of intrepid modders over at Teclab have created an RTX 4090 Super, or its equivalent, by cobbling together a sort of “frankenGPU” that’s significantly faster than the standard Lovelace flagship graphics card.
You may recall that there have been rumors of an RTX 4090 Ti (which was believed to be the name at the time, before the Super variants surfaced for Lovelace) circulating for a while now, so it’s interesting to see this finally happen – well, sort of.
The ‘RTX 4090 Super’ in question is 13% faster than the standard RTX 4090 Wccftech reports, but in reality it’s an AD102 GPU (the chip inside the RTX 4090) sitting on the logic board of an RTX 3090 Ti, with video RAM coming from an RTX 4080 Super.
The board specifically comes from a Galax RTX 3090 Ti HOF OC model, a high-end board with premium components that are built for heavy overclocking. The board features the AD102 chip and GDDR6X VRAM from the RTX 4080 Super, running at 24Gbps.
After that VRAM was then overclocked to nearly 26Gbps and a few other tweaks were applied, the supercharged RTX 4090 was found to be 13% faster in the Unigine Superposition benchmark at 8K resolution compared to the regular RTX 4090.
But when the GPU was also overclocked to 3GHz, the lead increased to 16%. That’s a more than healthy difference for a ‘Super’ version of a graphics card.
Analysis: Speed Demons
This is a useful experiment from Teclab, and it shows what we could have had if Nvidia had given the Super treatment to its top-end Lovelace GPU instead of stopping at the RTX 4080 Super. Of course, the RTX 4090 was powerful enough for this generation anyway – and in many ways for the next one too, though a much more powerful flagship featuring Blackwell graphics cards is still on the way.
If the rumors are true, we’ll see the RTX 5090 later in 2024 (and likely the RTX 5080 too, perhaps even a little earlier than the next-gen flagship). And what’s interesting about this mod is that we can clearly see the effects of faster video RAM illustrated, and Blackwell has taken this even further by loading it with cutting-edge GDDR7 memory. This will hit 28Gbps (or even faster) and offers a host of performance improvements, as has already been significantly rumored.
Expectations are still high that the RTX 5090 will be a significant leap forward over the RTX 4090. Much faster VRAM will be a key part of the frame rate improvements that Nvidia’s next-generation flagship GPU will undoubtedly deliver.