Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti review: revisiting the super-performers

Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on June 6, 2022

Let's start with the games that we call the super-performers, the ones that we saw the biggest generation on generation improvements when we first started testing RTX 30-series graphics cards. Each of the four games in this section are modern titles using advanced graphics APIs, like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which are able to make better use of high core count processors - like the Core i9 10900K in our test rig. That should help lessen CPU bottlenecking at lower resolutions.

We've run our benchmarks at the standard three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K. If you're gaming on an ultra-wide, you can expect 2560x1080 screens to require slightly more graphics horsepower than you'd need for a 16:9 Full HD display, while the more common 3440x1440 resolution is almost exactly between 1440p and 4K.

Our benchmark results are presented a little differently to what you might be used to elsewhere on the web. On mobile, you'll get a basic overview, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is a bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal: Vulkan, Ultra Nightmare, 8x TSSAA

Doom Eternal is a cracking game - I've just been playing through it recently and I've loved the visual design - and one that uses hardware resources very efficiently. That means we can see high frame-rates even at 4K, but it also means that there's plenty of differentiation between different graphics cards at this resolution. We'd expect the RTX 3090 Ti to perform excellently here, and indeed the 211fps average at 4K is a new record. It's a solid 11.5 percent faster than the RTX 3090, and 21 percent faster than the RX 6900 XT (we haven't been able to source an RX 6950 XT, sadly). At 1080p and 1440p, the 3090 to 3090 Ti gap drops to seven percent.

Control

Control: High, DX12, TAA

Control's purely rasterised mode is still tougher to run than Doom Eternal, with the RTX 3090 Ti managing only 69fps (nice) at native 4K. That's a five percent advantage over the RTX 3090, but a whopping 31 percent lead over the RX 6900 XT. This game historically plays better on Nvidia hardware, and as we'll see later on in the RT benchmarks section, that goes double once ray tracing is involved. Thankfully, DLSS works well in this game to boost frame-rates, and sub-native provides a way forward to hitting a 4K 120fps target.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3: Bad Ass, DX12, TAA

Borderlands 3 is another game that exhibits an 11 percent performance differential for the Ti over the standard 3090 - some way short of the 33 percent we'd need to call the Ti a 'good value' in comparison to the vanilla model but at least an appreciable difference. The RX 6900 XT is more competitive here, effectively tying the 3090 while being 13 percent behind the 3090 Ti.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Highest, DX12, TAA

We conclude with our only multi-part benchmark, Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The variable time between each of the three sections was an interesting engineering challenge for us, as it meant we couldn't just measure from the start to the end as we normally do - we have to cut out just the active scenes to get a representative result. This was initially done manually, but we now have a script to combine the three parts into a single 'cache' file to upload to the Eurogamer server, making the game much less painful to retest.

In terms of performance, it's fairly standard stuff - an 8 percent 4K advantage for the Ti, while the card outperforms the RX 6900 XT by nearly 25 percent exactly. Compared to the fastest card of the previous generation, the RTX 2080 Ti, the 3090 Ti is a solid 58 percent faster.

We normally expect to see the biggest performance deltas in these four titles, so let's see how the 3090 Ti fares in games that don't boast as modern architectures and CPU utilisation.