Will I see better performance with an RTX 4090 than with an RTX 3090?

Jim Crisp · August 2

I hope this is the appropriate place to post this.

My six-year-old computer is displaying symptoms indicating an issue with the motherboard, so I am going to replace it. The new one will have an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU, an X67E motherboard, at least 64 GB DDR5 RAM, and all SSDs for storage. My main goal is to have the best SL performance I can.

I am wondering if I would see appreciably better SL performance by getting an RTX 4090 graphics card than I would by using the RTX 3090 that I currently have. With my current computer, I saw a marked improvement when I replaced an RTX 1080 with the RTX 3090. I went from having appreciable lag when running at 1920x1080 to having virtually no lag when running 4K.

Thanks for any advice.

Edited August 2 by Jim Crisp
Typo

Arluelle · August 3

I went from a 3090 to a 4090, and I went from a 5950x to a 13900k.

I don't have any data to back this up so take everything with a grain of salt. The CPU single core performance upgrade gave me a better improvement than the upgrade to the 4090. If I have all graphics setting enabled and no frame limit set, the GPU utilization (as displayed in the Task Manager) will be somewhere between 25% and 75% (Firestorm.) You see that the bottleneck is not the 4090. You may wanna compare this with your 3090.

If you are not set on the CPU yet you should wait for the Ryzen 9000 series benchmarks that will be released within the next 2 weeks and check their single core performance. People say that X3D doesn't do anything for SL. Don't buy Intel due to the current issues.

4 hours ago, Jim Crisp said:

at least 64 GB DDR5 RAM

AFAIK you can only use 2 RAM slots with overclocked DDR5 RAM so 64GB should be your maximum at the same time.

Ron Khondji · August 3

With 64GB you can afford to use a ram disk as your cache location. That could be more of a difference than going from a 3090 to a 4090, I think.

AmeliaJ08 · August 3

Both a 3090 and a 4090 are pretty wasted in SL. I doubt you would notice much difference.

animats · August 3

Only if your 3090 is at 100% GPU utilization will you see improvement with a higher-end GPU.

If you run Firestorm 7.x and turn everything up to Ultra, you might achieve that.

Extrude Ragu · August 3

You really don't need a '90 series graphics card to run SL or that amount of RAM. I do happen to have a 4090 because I do AI inferencing but I would have never spent that much on hardware just for SL itself.

Jim Crisp · August 7

Thanks for the helpful input.

Ehawee Ravenhurst · September 3

Hello

I try to understand how the SL performanc works at all.

I actually do have a RTX4090 and a 7800X3D and soon 64 GB RAM (2 x 32), atm 32 (2 x 16). The monitor has 2560 x 1440 resolution and a frame rate up to 180 Hz. Ultra-HD resolution is nicer to look at for me, but in the end that also affects the fps.

The graphics in the Firestorm PBR viewer I set on Ultra with 150m draw distance.

Both are somehow not really used to capacity and yet you don't get more fps, although you can still move reasonably normally at 25 to 30 fps in clubs with 70 or 80 avatars with the 4090 at your back.

Sometimes it hitches briefly, but then works again.

I normally use Linux and 64 GB of RAM certainly makes more sense because it is used before a swap file is used - in contrast to Windows, if you can believe the MSI Afterburner and the values in the OSD.

I usually have 1 to 3 browsers running in the background with lots of tabs open and I may have a video playing in the background in one of the browsers, which I listen to. However, not for the values in the snapshots I will attach.

On a sky at 3300m without other avatars far and wide, the fps goes really high, although there is not really much to do there and I usually limit the fps because this can also save power.

I have now installed Windows 11 on the PC, I have not yet been able to test it under Linux.

My 4-year-old notebook (desktop replacement) with RTX 2080 Super, which is probably more like an RTX 1080 on a desktop PC and has an Ultra HD monitor, usually has half the fps with the last non-PBR Firestorm - also Ultra graphics with 120m draw distance, but usually already with cutbacks in clubs (reduced draw distance, shadows off and things like that).

In addition, the last time I used the old notebook with the cam, I could only point it at my avatar (and at the same time avoid having too many other avatars behind it in the cam) in clubs. Of course, that was different when I bought it 4 years ago.

I took 3 screenshots in a club, another one on a sky at 3300m with nobody around.

In the club, the fans of the RTX 4090 sometimes even switch off.

On my old notebook, the fans would rev up on the PBR version, it got loud and also quite hot and even with lower graphics there was always stuttering - but I only had Linux to test this.
In contrast, the new hardware now seems really chilled and is quiet.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how the new hardware runs under Linux. But I probably won't have much more performance in SL with Linux.

I wonder what the bottleneck could be?

I've also noticed that on some days the fps in SL seems to be higher than on others.

I've also noticed fluctuations of sometimes 30 fps within minutes - without my avatar or cam moving, e.g. from 60 to 90 or 70 to 100 etc. I just looked at the screen.

I am of course happy with the new hardware, it was getting quite frustrating for me with the old notebook.
And I also limit the fps where it makes sense to save power.
But I still find it all a bit confusing.