COMPARE / RTX 3090 VS RTX 4090
RTX 3090 vs RTX 4090
Specs from the chip makers' datasheets; prices from the live Compute Cafe panel, refreshed hourly. Every rate is an on-demand published price with a source receipt.
CHEAPEST RTX 3090
$0.080/hr
SpotGPUs · median $0.45 · 26 providers
CHEAPEST RTX 4090
$0.090/hr
SpotGPUs · median $0.48 · 38 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
RTX 3090
live panel, 2026-09-27
| RTX 3090 | RTX 4090 | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2020 | 2022 |
| MEMORY | 24 GB GDDR6X | 24 GB GDDR6X |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 936 GB/s | 1.0 TB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 142 TFLOPS FP16 tensor dense (285 sparse) | 330 TFLOPS FP16 tensor dense (660 sparse); FP8 supported |
| POWER DRAW | 350 W | 450 W |
| INTERCONNECT | PCIe 4.0 x16 (NVLink bridge on pairs) | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
HOW TO CHOOSE
RTX 3090 vs RTX 4090
4090 is ~2.3x faster per card; 3090 has NVLink pairs and lower panel prices. Single card: 4090. Two-card 48 GB jobs: 3090 pair.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090
Same 24 GB, roughly half the FP16 throughput, but with NVLink pairs - the only consumer option for linking two cards. 4090 is faster per card; 3090 scales to 48 GB per pair.
Workload fit
RTX 3090: budget fine-tuning, small-model inference. RTX 4090: small-model inference, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image generation.
RTX 3090 VS RTX 4090 - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, RTX 3090 or RTX 4090?
By today's published on-demand rates: RTX 3090 starts at $0.080/GPU/hr (median $0.45, 26 providers) and RTX 4090 starts at $0.090/GPU/hr (median $0.48, 38 providers). The cheapest live listing is the RTX 3090 at SpotGPUs. Figures recompute from the panel on every refresh.
RTX 3090 or RTX 4090 - which should I rent?
RTX 3090: The RTX 3090 remains the budget multi-GPU favorite: 24 GB per card, and uniquely among consumer cards its generation supports NVLink bridge pairs - 48 GB linked for under a dollar an hour on parts of the panel. RTX 4090: The RTX 4090 is the consumer card that built the budget GPU-cloud market: L40S-class FP16 throughput at a fraction of the price, limited by 24 GB of memory, no ECC, and no datacenter software features. The side-by-side spec table and live price rows above give the full picture.
Where can I rent RTX 3090 and RTX 4090?
26 providers publish RTX 3090 rates and 38 publish RTX 4090 rates on Compute Cafe. Every row links to the provider's own published price - committed-use and reserved rates are excluded.
Full pricing: RTX 3090 · RTX 4090 · all comparisons