The 4090 is a stupid card pushed way past the efficiency sweetspot for a few percent in performance so NVidia can claim they have the fastest card. The power is insane - 600w is more than the rest of the computer. The cooling solutions are ridiculous - 3.5 slot card and 2.5kg for the rog strix version. Benchmarks show that you can set the power limit to 60% to get 95% of performance in games along with better thermals, noise, etc.
I wonder if Nvidia is cranking up the performance not for games, but other applications such as 3D rendering and AI/ML. If you look at the benchmarks for Blender [1], a popular open-source 3D software, you will see the 4090 easily beats out all the other competitors, with 2x the rendering speed of the second on that list, which is another Nvidia RTX card (3090) that used to be the fastest till the 4090 came along.
