Unreal Engine 4.26 – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Performance

Introduction

First announced back in January, NVIDIA has released a new top-of-the-line video card, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This card features the same 24GB of VRAM as the RTX 3090 but adds a few more CUDA, RT, and Tensor Cores as well as faster clock speeds. The trade-off for this extra performance is power. The TGP, or how much power a video card may use, has increased from 350W to 450W.

Professional applications such as Unreal Engine from Epic scale very well with the number of available CUDA cores and the speed of those cores. This card should see a bump in performance over the base RTX 3090, but we’ll need to look at real-world tests to see exactly how much of a gain it provides.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

As we noted earlier, the RTX 3090 Ti has the same VRAM as the RTX 3090, but has a slightly higher CUDA core. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need the ultimate GPU performance.

One concern we have is that this is a 450W card – 100 watts more than the RTX 3090 – but uses the same cooler design. This could make it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of June 8th, 2021

To test each video card, we used Unreal Engine 4.26. These tests were run twice on each GPU, with the best result being included in the graphs below.

Raw Benchmark Results

While we are going to go through our analysis of the testing in the next section, we are providing the raw results for those that want to dig into the details. If there is a specific sort of project you work with, you can compare it to the scene that most closely matches your work.

ArchViz – High texture count and resolution, highly detailed meshes, baked lighting

Megascans Apartment – high-end game quality assets and lighting. Both with and without Ray tracing

Megascans Temple – Cinematic quality assets an textures. Numerous shadow casting lights. Ray tracing. High VRAM usage (15GB+)

GameDev Specific Analysis

Game Development is usually less concerned about GPU performance than the people actually playing the games. Better FPS in your viewport doesn’t make much difference past a certain point, say 30-60 FPS. And if you can only manage 30 FPS in your game while using a 3090, not many potential consumers of your game will be able to play with acceptable frame rates. GameDev also doesn’t push the VRAM too far for the same reason. If your target consumer has 4-8GB of VRAM, then using 24GB isn’t going to help you.

As we can see from averaging out the GameDev scenes from our tests, the RTX 3090 Ti is roughly 9% faster than the current RTX 3090. The score above is weighted heavier toward rasterized workloads, but the same 9% is seen in both rasterized and ray tracing projects.

Virtual Production Analysis

Virtual Production runs the gamut from simple scenes with minimal geometry and textures, to cinematic quality assets needing huge amounts of VRAM. The massive 24GB of VRAM available with the RTX 3090 was already the best choice for high-end virtual production workflows, and the RTX 3090 Ti shows average FPS increase by 8%. This score is heavily weighted to ray tracing as well as 4k resolutions, to VRAM plays a big role.

The 3090 Ti still does not support Sync, so it is still not a viable option for powering LED walls. However, it does make a good option for artist workstations.

Overall Performance Analysis

Overall, the raw performance of the RTX 3090 Ti is quite impressive and lines up about where you would expect given its specifications. In most cases, it outperforms the RTX 3090 by roughly 8-9%. This is certainly an interesting card for many Unreal Engine users looking for the ultimate in performance. However, many users, especially those in game development, may find the extra cost does not justify a few extra frames per second.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB perform in Unreal Engine?

The RTX 3090 Ti offers nearly 9% higher frames per second than the RTX 3090. This does make it the fastest GPU option for Unreal Engine users. At $500 more than the base RTX 3090 yet only offering a few percent more performance, it is somewhat hard to justify. If you need the best of the best, than the RTX 3090 Ti is the way to go. If you don't think you'll notice that 9% difference, you can save yourself a few hundred dollars.

Also of concern is the much larger power draw, a full 30% higher than the base RTX 3090. This means extra thought needs to be put into the power supply and overall cooling of the system. During our testing we saw peak power draw of nearly 100W more than the base 3090, and temperatures between 5-10 degrees warmer in our open air test beds. This is still within the capabilities of the platforms we sell, but any factory overclocked versions of this card may need some extra scrutiny. We’ll have more in-depth power the thermal testing later.

As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for Unreal Engine. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by "Video Card") for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.