Game Testing & Performance

We test a few titles here in 8K resolution, but without a true 8K monitor this has to be done via Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR). This allows games to render in 8K, and then the card down-samples this output to a lower resolution to display, in this case, 4K. While this may not perfectly replicate true 8K testing, the results should be close enough to give you a good idea of what to expect. The fact that this generation of cards is capable of producing anything more than a slideshow at 8K is a testament to just how powerful this generation really is.

Ashes of the Singularity

Planet by planet, a war is raging across the galaxy. The technological singularity has given humanity the power to expand further than they ever have before. Now, they compete with each other and their sentient artificial intelligence adversaries for control of newfound worlds.

We don’t see huge gains here over the RTX 3080, but Zotac’s RTX 3090 Trinity barely edges it out. It also does a pretty spectacular job rendering at 8K here as well.

One of the biggest reasons we don’t see much gain here is shown right here in task manager. At 1440p fifteen of our 24 threads are all but pegged out and it’s nearly as bad at 4K. Even this 12 core, 24-thread beast of a chip is getting hammered trying to feed this monster 3090 Trinity.

 

Far Cry 5

Anything can happen. Everything will.

Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult—known as The Project at Eden’s Gate—that is threatening the community’s freedom. Stand up to the cult’s leaders, Joseph Seed, and the Heralds, as you spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community.

Far Cry 5 shows a small but notable gain at 1440p and does an excellent job at 8K.

We want to show here that even at 4K, maximum settings, we have 2 cores pegged at 100%, even though one is ping-ponging back and forth between two logical cores. At 4K, we are still CPU bottlenecked!

 

Far Cry New Dawn
Face off against the Highwaymen and their leaders, the Twins as you fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic frontier. Form unexpected alliances, build a deadly arsenal of makeshift weapons using the remnants of the old world.

New Dawn shows similar results, and we again are slamming 2 cores at 4K, with 4 more threads at about 50-60% load.

 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Experience Lara Croft’s defining moment as she becomes the Tomb Raider. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara must master a deadly jungle, overcome terrifying tombs, and persevere through her darkest hour. As she races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, Lara will ultimately be forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.

Zotac’s RTX 3090 Trinity does a great job in the latest Tomb Raider installment, but we again see very high CPU usage trying to feed this monster. At 4K it does finally start to pull away and hit the GPU harder than the CPU at least. We see playable 8K frame rates with DLSS upping us to a very playable 37 FPS average. It would be very easy to tweak this game to get 8K60 with no noticeable visual loss.

Just to show you, even at 1440p, we are still hitting the 12-core CPU pretty hard with a few cores near max, and several others heavily loaded. SOTR does a fair job of spreading this load around though so it doesn’t see much of a bottleneck at 1440p and above.

 

Metro Exodus
Metro Exodus is an epic, story-driven first-person shooter from 4A Games that blends deadly combat and stealth with exploration and survival horror in one of the most immersive game worlds ever created.

The RTX 3090 Trinity comes dangerously close to maxing out 4K and hitting 60FPS average with RTX and DLSS running.

 

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

 

While you can’t quite look at it this way, we can over-simplify and call 16.6ms 60Hz, so the 3090 Trinity can clear the 60 FPS mark at 8K. it’s also the fastest at every lower resolution.

 

Quake II RTX

Quake II RTX is a cutting-edge, ray-traced reimagining of id software’s old school classic, by NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios. Global lighting effects, including realistic reflections, refraction, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination are a result of the path-traced simulation of light.

At 4K, the 3090 Trinity blasts out a solid 35 FPS average in Quake 2 RTX.

 

Minecraft with RTX (Beta)

Minecraft with RTX brings fully path-traced rendering, physically-based materials, and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to Minecraft, delivering bleeding-edge visual fidelity and realism that can be experienced on all GeForce RTX GPUs

At 4K, the RTX 3090 Trinity is able to brute-force an average of 35.1 FPS with Ray Tracing on. With DLSS helping out, it jumps to just under 60 FPS of glorious square eye candy.