The NVIDIA RTX 4090 is a very fast graphics card that has raised the bar for speed. For tasks like 3D rendering gaming and other GPU heavy apps it offers lightning fast speeds. A lot of people might think that photographers should buy such a high end GPU to make editing photos better.
It is true that photo editors like Photoshop Lightroom and Capture One now support GPU acceleration. But the truth is that photographers don’t need the RTX 4090 even though it is fast. This article will look at whether photographers really need a GPU like this and talk about better options that are a lot cheaper.
Testing Framework
We set up a controlled environment with the same hardware for all tests so we could see how well the GPUs worked. The goal was to see how the RTX 4090 stacks up against older models like the RTX 3070 RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 in terms of how it handles photo editing tasks.
A PC with an Intel Core i9-11900K processor 64GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM and a fast 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro NVMe SSD was used for the tests. This setup was picked because it strikes a good balance between the performance of the processor and the storage making sure that the GPU was the major factor that affected the test results.
The photo editing programs we tested were Adobe Lightroom Classic Capture One Pro and Photoshop which are all used in real life. The tests were made to mimic how photographers usually work so the programs have different amounts of GPU acceleration.
For instance we checked how long it took to export a lot of photos at once which is something that photographers who work with high resolution images often do. We also looked at tasks like upscaling with AI and effects in Photoshop that GPUs speed up.
The point was to see how the GPUs were actually different in terms of performance and how performance got worse as the GPUs got more powerful. We were curious to find out if the RTX 4090 would make everyday photo editing tasks much better after we bought it. We were able to tell if the most expensive GPU was worth the money by testing several of them in the same way.
Performance In 3D Rendering Benchmarks
The RTX 4090 is great for professionals who work in animation visual effects and gaming because it does demanding tasks like 3D rendering so well. 3D rendering tests like VRay Blender and OctaneBench show that the RTX 4090 is very fast.
The RTX 4090 is twice as fast as the RTX 3090 in both CUDA and Ray Tracing tests in VRay. It can render more than 4,200 “vpaths” and more than 5,500 “vtrays” in just one minute. This level of improvement is amazing, especially when you compare it to GPUs from earlier generations.
The RTX 4090 is more than twice as fast as the RT3090 in the Blender Monster scene which means that it can render more complex scenes faster. The RTX 4090’s advanced architecture which includes TSMC’s 4nm process, more CUDA cores and better memory bandwidth is what makes it run faster.
When it comes to OctaneBench the RTX 4090 really shines. It gets almost twice as fast as the 3090. This makes it one of the best GPUs for tasks that need a lot of graphic power like rendering very high resolution video files or figuring out how to make complicated 3D animations.
The performance gains seen in these 3D rendering tests on the other hand are not important for most photographers. These tasks need a lot of GPU power which the RTX 4090 has in spades. But editing photos even with more advanced tools doesn’t need this much GPU power.
Photographers mostly work with two dimensional images which makes tasks like exporting resizing with AI and using small GPU accelerated filters more common. In these everyday photo editing tasks the RTX 4090 huge rendering power is not used. So even though the RTX 4090 is great hardware for rendering 3D models, photographers don’t need a GPU with such powerful features for their work.
Photo Editing Benchmarks
- Lightroom Classic: GPU acceleration makes exporting much faster but there isn’t much difference between the RTX 3070 and RTX 4090. Any modern GPU works well with Lightroom for most tasks.
- Capture One Pro 22: Like Lightroom, GPU acceleration speeds up exports. Higher end GPUs like the RTX 4090 aren’t much better than mid range GPUs though. For most users differences in performance are not very important.
- Photoshop: Tasks that use GPU acceleration like Sky Replacement and Super Resolution go faster on a powerful GPU but only for a small amount of time. Most photographers won’t notice big differences in how well normal editing tasks run.
Conclusion
Even though the RTX 4090 is a great graphics card, photographers don’t need it. Many photo editing tasks don’t need the power of a high end GPU even when GPU acceleration is used. The RTX 4090 does great at 3D rendering and gaming but photographers don’t usually use it for those things.
GPUs like the RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 are much cheaper alternatives that work just as well for editing photos. With less expensive GPUs photographers can save money and still get great results. Buying the RTX 4090 to edit photos doesn’t give you enough benefits to make the price worth it.
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