With undervolting and nearly halving its power limit, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 only loses 8% performance.

According to an undervolting adventure review by Korean tech journal Quasar Zone, the enormous NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada” graphics card has the potential to be a very efficient high-end graphics card with a daily-use undervolt and with its power-limit reduced. The reviewer reduced software-level power-limits when testing the RTX 4090 with various GPU core voltage settings (down from its 450 W default).

It’s crucial to remember that the RTX 4090’s power limit of 450 W is a very arbitrary figure because typical gaming workloads rarely require that much power from the GPU. Its gaming power draw during our own tests at default settings is 340 W. When testing the RTX 4090, Quasar Zone used a power limit as low as 60%. (270 W). Averaged across five AAA titles at its highest settings, the card was found to lose just over 8% of performance at 4K UHD with the most aggressive power management they could generate (i.e. 270 W PL). Similar results can be obtained by undervolting the GPU from its stock 1 V to 850 mV. In both situations, the performance loss appears to be well-contained while reducing the power drain (in turn heat and noise).