Do you need a lot of power from your graphics card? No, let’s rephrase that: like, a lot of power? Then the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G could be the next GPU for you. As a top-of-the-heap power-hungry productivity dynamo, the RTX 3090 Suprim soars, knocking out every productivity benchmark we could throw its way while posting all-time records in gaming tests. But all that power comes at a price ($1,799 MSRP, to be exact), and its performance results alone don’t justify a 150% increase over the perfectly capable gaming beast that is the Editors’ Choice-winning RTX 3080 Founders Edition ($699, if you can find one). That said, for content creators or elite gamers unbound by mortal budgets, you won’t find a more powerful option on the market for the price. This overclocked mega-card does more than enough to justify its place at the top of the top of the stack.
Specs Compared: MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G vs. the World
Cards in the RTX 3090 line fall under the same category that used to be occupied by Nvidia’s Titan GPUs in the RTX 20 Series, and the Titan X before that during the launch of 10 Series. These graphics cards, while perfectly capable of gaming, are priced and configured in a way that’s more aptly suited to content-creation professionals than your average gamer.
In the past, cards in this tier of the market would be stuffed with a good deal more VRAM than anything else offered in midrange or even most “high-end” releases (save for unicorns like the $799 AMD Radeon VII, with its 24GB of HBM2 memory), and things are no different this time around. While the RTX 3080 Founders Edition comes with an impressive 10GB of GDDR6X RAM, the RTX 3090 ups that to a whopping 24GB, the same amount as its spiritual predecessor, the $2,499 Nvidia Titan RTX.
You’ll notice the lack of a “GeForce” badge there. The re-introduction of high-VRAM variants of Nvidia’s mainstream graphics lineup, including advertising the RTX 3090 as the “world’s first 8K gaming card,” blurs the line a bit between what gamers and content creators can spend on their next graphics card if they want the top dog.
And that spend is not small. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti set a precedent for GPU pricing at $1,199 for the Founders Edition, and with the RTX 3090 Founders Edition inching up the goalpost to $1,399 (while still using the same GA102 die found in the $699 RTX 3080 Founders Edition), you might think that Nvidia is reconfiguring expectations for what kind of cash gamers need to fork over for absolute top frame rates in their favorite titles. That said, gamers aren’t really the primary target here, despite this card’s big-time gamer look. (Though Nvidia and MSI would surely be happy to sell gamers cards of this caliber, too.)
Like the Titan RTX, the $1,799 MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G finds itself slotting in at the highest end of what most gamers would consider strictly for gaming, while still falling well below Nvidia’s enterprise-facing Quadro line of content-creation cards ($5,500 for the Quadro RTX 8000), which are more often found in a server rack than an RGB-packed gaming tower.
That said, according to a comparison of 163 results from the website UserBenchmark (grain of salt here, they are “user submitted,” after all), the RTX 3090 regularly outpaces the latest and greatest Quadro RTX 8000 in both performance and overall value by a strong margin. (Various benchmark results submitted by users include gaming-focused runs like MRender, which tests a GPUs ability to use render target arrays and geometry shaders in Direct3D, as well as NBody, a particle physics simulation that tests how quickly the card can calculate gravity values between thousands of individual points in space.)
Last December, Nvidia quietly rolled out its $4,650 A6000 line of GPUs, part of a stack that could be called “Quadro” by any other name. The A6000 is focused on enterprise buyers exclusively, and with stock situations being what they are for the RTX 30 Series, it’s likely that getting your hands on these workhorses would be even harder than winning a Newegg component lottery.
So for those content creators in between, we have cards like the massive 13.2-inch, triple-fan, triple-slot-width MSI GeForce 3090 Suprim X 24G to overstuff the gap. This card shows off some of MSI’s best aesthetic choices in a long time, in my opinion, with an RGB strip that stretches from one end of the card to another. The strip also illuminates the space behind a see-through MSI logo, cut through the metal of the back of the card. All the RGB lighting and features of the RTX 3090 Suprim can be controlled through MSI’s Dragon Center Software, which contains myriad ways to customize your Suprim to fit your RGB preferences (if you have such urges at all, of course).
On the top of the card, I found an NVLink connector, a rare find in the RTX 30 Series these days. Nvidia hasn’t completely scrapped the idea of dual-card solutions just yet, and sensibly the company has left the technology as an option only in the RTX 3090 class of cards. Though there are a few games out there that know how to take advantage of two graphics cards linked up through either NVLink or the aging SLI standard, the best usage case for NVLink these days is in productivity and content-creation tasks, which is exactly what the RTX 3090 was designed for. We didn’t have another identical RTX 3090 on hand to test the feature, though. RTX 3090s, like every other high-end graphics card in the world right now, aren’t easy to come by.
To handle the power requirements of the “Ampere”-based GA102 die, the MSI RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G sucks down a staggering 420 watts of power, and like the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G requires three eight-pin connectors to boot up. MSI doesn’t sell an adapter with this card the same way Nvidia has packaged 12-pin converters with its RTX 3090 Founders Edition, so make sure you have a PSU that can support this card as well as all the necessary cables before you hit the buy button.
The back of the card contains your usual smattering of port options seen in the RTX 30 Series, including three DisplayPort 1.4b slots, one HDMI 2.1 port, and…well, no VirtualLink connections to be seen.
Let’s Get Testing! How Supreme Is the ‘Suprim’?
PC Labs ran the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard. All cards below were tested on this rig. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2021 to cut the CPU out of the equation for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our standard benchmark regimen, which tests a card’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and you’re worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but many of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling integrated directly into the game. This can mean boosts of up to 40 percent more performance on top, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other two resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our list of AAA titles includes a mix of recent AAA titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and F1 2020, as well as some older-but-still-reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL’s circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme test, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. Finally there’s Port Royal, which is strictly a test for RTX cards right now, measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. (Thus why blank results for the AMD cards on that one.) Also here are a handful of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark, V-Ray, LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link.
If there’s anywhere the MSI RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G is going to make the case for its high cost, it’s here. The 24GB of onboard VRAM sends the RTX 3090 to new heights in these tests, setting records wherever it goes, though perhaps not by the kinds of margins that you might have been expecting given the price.
Admittedly, our testing regimen is more geared toward synthetic gaming tests. However, both the LuxMark and V-Ray results paint a picture of a card with a whole lot of power to handle tasks like pathing out light rays and or rendering in complete 3D scenes with reflective surfaces.
These are limited benchmarks, but they still tell the story that any content professionals who work in fields like virtual effects, 3D modelling, design, or any other creative career that requires a lot of GPU horsepower should be lining up around the block to get their hands on an RTX 3090.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games
Now on to the real-world game stuff. The following benchmarks are games that you can play. We typically used in each case (for the AAA games) the highest in-game preset and, if available, DirectX 12. The multiplayer-focused and esports titles (such as CS:GO and Rainbow Six) were set slightly below top detail settings to maximize frame rates.
During its marketing blitz, Nvidia chose to focus on the RTX 3090 as the “world’s first 8K gaming card,” though this is disputable, depending on a huge variety of factors that won’t fit in the small print. (Cards that came before the RTX 3090 can run games and applications at 8K…it’s just a matter of how well.)
While we didn’t run any games at 8K for this set of benchmarks, the results show that just getting to 60fps in 4K isn’t always possible for the RTX 3090, let alone 8K. That said, what we did see out of the RTX 3090 Suprim impressed us nonetheless.
As a top-floor-with-a-view kind of card, the gaming performance of the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim outpaces any other GPU we’ve tested to date, and not always by a small margin. In some of the titles we tested, like Red Dead Redemption 2, the RTX 3090 was more than 20% faster than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition in 1440p, though that gain dipped to just 12% in 4K. We can’t say how much extra juice MSI has imparted into its RTX 3090 over other models just yet, since Founders Edition RTX 3090 cards were in short supply from Nvidia during the RTX 30 Series launch and PCMag didn’t get the opportunity to test one.
That said, no matter what numbers the 3090 FE puts up, it won’t take anything away from the victory of the RTX 3090 Suprim. The only thing that would? A reminder of the Suprim’s $1,799 price. When compared with the card it usurped (the $759 MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G), the wins in gaming are immediately brought back into perspective.
Testing Results: Multiplayer Games
Though most of PC Labs’ game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we’ve kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Final Fantasy XIV tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep frame rates for 1080p games above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s a coveted target for highly competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 120Hz or 144Hz (or faster) monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz monitors, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips under 60fps, is fine.
If the RTX 3080 Founders Edition was already completely overkill for multiplayer games like CS:GO or Rainbow Six, the RTX 3090 is well past the point of just showing off.
The RTX 3090 blasts out all the games we could throw its way, though not by a margin anywhere near the difference in price that would make it a good pick for multiplayer gamers over the venerable RTX 3080 Founders Edition, or even the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, which we at PC Labs consider the sweet spot for high-refresh 1440p gaming these days.
Cards based on the GA102 die are already pushing these engines to their limits, and a 13% gain in Rainbow Six frames (especially at 400fps-plus, faster than even the fastest monitors), isn’t going to make or break getting the critical headshot in your next round. Plus it definitely isn’t worth the nearly 140% difference in price between the RTX 3090 Suprim and MSI’s RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G. Unless you’re an esports star making millions of bucks, a lesser RTX card will do for these kinds of games.
Testing Results: How About Some Legacy AAA Titles?
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider (2013), and Bioshock: Infinite, the last being a game that has no business still being as well optimized as it is here in 2020.
Legacy titles, like multiplayer games, are more of a flex than anything else for cards at the level of the RTX 3090…but that doesn’t mean we still don’t want to see it roll its sleeves up a little.
Depending on the game, there were either clear ceilings where neither the RTX 3080 nor the RTX 3090 could go much further, and others like Bioshock: Infinite, which will take every ounce of power you throw its way and translate it into record after record. Again, the RTX 3090 is way over the limit for what you should be paying if all you plan to do is play games that came out several years ago. But it’s still nice to know that if you wanted to go that hard in the paint, the option is there.
Overclocking and Thermals: Too Close to the Sun?
We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G, and the card peaked at a temperature of 81 degrees C. This makes the MSI Geforce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G the hottest RTX 30 Series card we’ve tested thus far, though that result is expected, given the added power hiding inside.
Though we’ve been able to pit the RTX 3080 Founders Edition against several third-party RTX 3080 cards since they originally launched in November, right now we have no point of comparison on heat or noise for the RTX 3090 Suprim. That said, for such an intimidating card on the outside, once we had it installed in the rig, it barely made a peep, even during the most intense scenarios.
When it came time to overclock the card using EVGA’s Precision X1 utility, I achieved a small, but stable, boost of 110MHz on the boost clock and 150MHz on the memory clock. However, this roughly 6% gain in clock speed didn’t translate to more than 1% gains in Far Cry 5 or Rainbow Six: Siege. LuxMark runs returned similarly slim gains, so the ceiling applied equally whether we tried to run gaming or content-creation benchmarks. This card was pretty well pushed to the max straight from the box.
The Best You Can Get, If You Can Find—and Afford—It
Right now, the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G is the best card built for the specific job it’s meant to handle. And considering that AMD’s Radeon VII is nearly two years old at this point (plus outside benchmarks which show the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT doesn’t hold a candle to the RTX 3090, nor should it considering their price differences), the likelihood of it remaining uncontested at this level remains strong.
If you are strictly a gamer and only care about playing games: Please don’t buy an RTX 3090, unless you just won the Mega Millions. And we mean that in the “for the greater good” sense. Stock of every Nvidia card is strung as thin as it can go as of this writing (January 2021), and that situation only looks to be getting more dire as to when Nvidia claims the supply will keep pace with demand.
Content creators, designers, virtual effects artists, and any other of the dozens of creative and industrial careers that can put the brawn of the RTX 3090 to use at its best work deserve to have their card too. So at least until the stock levels catch up, we can’t in good conscience recommend this card strictly as an option for gamers who want 2.9% more frames than an RTX 3080 in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey at 4K resolution.
But nor would we do so on the basis of price, either. At $1,799, the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim was only around 15% faster, on average, than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition in 4K and 1440p, and those are the only two resolutions you should really be playing in, with this kind of card. Considering that at retail, the RTX 3080 Founders Edition goes for just $699 (not factoring in scalping prices, which could increase even further after tariffs), that’s just over a 157% increase in cost. This is a disproportionate gulf for a moderate—and perhaps even invisible, depending on your gaming monitor—boost in gaming performance.
Are you the progeny of an oil baron with $1,799 burning a hole in your pocket? Then, hey, go for it: The MSI RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G is the fastest graphics card we’ve ever tested for gaming, full stop. But if you’re like the rest of us, an RTX 3080 Founders Edition will handle the job almost as well for less than half the cost (at retail). We don’t know how either cards will be affected by the incoming tariffs, nor the continuing stock situation, but all we can say is this: Don’t buy an RTX 3090 for gaming in desperation, just because it’s there. Leave that stock for the people who need it to create, and start mashing that F5 button on the page for any number of other RTX 3080 models instead.
For those creators and builders, though, your top card just got a whole lot more powerful…and, yes, it games like a city-stomping monster, to boot.
