NVIDIA · Ada Lovelace · 2022
NVIDIA RTX 4090
The people's inference GPU. On marketplaces, the best $/FLOP in the catalog.
24 GB runs 7B FP16 or ~32B at 4-bit. Rents for well under $0.50/hr on community marketplaces, a fraction of datacenter pricing per FLOP.
Where to rent a RTX 4090
On-demand prices per GPU-hour; marketplace rates refresh daily, list prices reviewed 2026-09. Reserved and spot run 30-70% lower. Full breakdown with the used market and rent-vs-buy math: RTX 4090 pricing.
| Provider | $/GPU-hr | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| RunPod | $0.34 | Community Cloud |
| TensorDock | $0.37 | marketplace |
| Packet.ai | $0.39 | Dedicated |
| Vast.ai | $0.43 | Verified-listing rate, refreshed daily; interruptible from ~$0.20 |
Specifications in context
Bars scaled against the best value in the whole catalog (B200 / MI325X era).
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace (2022) |
|---|---|
| Memory | 24 GB GDDR6X, 1.01 TB/s |
| Interconnect | PCIe Gen4 |
| Form factor | Consumer card |
| Partitioning | No MIG (time-slicing / vGPU only) |
What fits on one RTX 4090
Weights + ~2 GB runtime overhead against 22 GB usable VRAM. Longer contexts and bigger batches need more, check the VRAM calculator.
| Model | Params | Highest precision that fits |
|---|---|---|
| Llama 3.2 1B | 1.24B | FP16 |
| Llama 3.2 3B | 3.21B | FP16 |
| Llama 3.1 8B | 8.03B | FP16 |
| Qwen2.5 7B | 7.62B | FP16 |
| Qwen2.5 14B | 14.8B | 8-bit |
| Mistral 7B | 7.25B | FP16 |
| Gemma 2 9B | 9.24B | 8-bit |
| Gemma 2 27B | 27.2B | 4-bit |
| Phi-4 14B | 14.7B | 8-bit |
| gpt-oss-20b | 20.9B | 4-bit |
Best for
- Hobbyist LLM hosting
- SDXL / Flux generation
- Budget fine-tuning of ≤8B models (QLoRA)
Compare
A100 80GB vs RTX 4090
The GPU that started the LLM era, now a value pick for fine-tuning and mid-size inference.
L40S vs RTX 4090
Ada silicon with 48 GB: strong FP8 compute, modest bandwidth. A favorite for image gen and mid-size LLMs.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090
The fastest thing you can put in a desktop: 32 GB of GDDR7 at 1.8 TB/s.
RTX 3090 vs RTX 4090
The used-market classic: 24 GB for a few hundred dollars, or pennies per hour rented.