NVIDIA RTX 3090

As the flagship of NVIDIA's 2020 Ampere desktop generation, the RTX 3090 pairs 10,496 CUDA cores with a massive 24GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus, giving it 936GB/s of bandwidth. That much VRAM was overkill for gaming even at launch, but it made the 3090 a favorite for 4K/8K content creation, large 3D scenes, and early machine-learning work that needed the memory headroom.

It draws up to 350W, so it needs a serious desktop power supply and case airflow - there's no laptop variant of this card. For pure gaming the 3080 or 3080 Ti deliver nearly identical frame rates for less money; the 3090's appeal is almost entirely about that 24GB of memory.