RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090
The RTX 3090 rents for 58% less per hour today — $0.25 against $0.60 — same 24 GB of memory, 936 vs 1,008 GB/s.
Prices collected 2026-09-18 · 7 providers price both
Index median per GPU-hour, on-demand, per snapshot.
Side by side
| RTX 4090 | RTX 3090 | |
|---|---|---|
| Median rental, per GPU-hour | $0.60 | $0.25 |
| Cheapest listing | $0.30 | $0.12 |
| Per month at 720 h | $432 | $180 |
| Providers pricing it | 13 | 7 |
| Memory | 24 GB GDDR6X | 24 GB GDDR6X |
| Memory bandwidth | 1,008 GB/s | 936 GB/s |
| GB of memory per $/hr | 40.0 | 96.0 |
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere |
| Class | Consumer | Consumer |
| Released | 2022-10 | 2020-09 |
Same provider, both GPUs
The cleanest comparison: 7 providers price both cards, so the difference is the GPU and nothing else. The RTX 4090 is cheaper at 0 of them.
| Provider | RTX 4090 | RTX 3090 | RTX 3090 premium |
|---|---|---|---|
 io.net | $0.30 | $0.25 | -17% |
 SaladCloud | $0.33 | $0.17 | -48% |
 RunPod Community Cloud | $0.34 | $0.22 | -35% |
| $0.39 | $0.15 | -62% | |
 GPU.ai | $0.60 | $0.34 | -44% |
 Vast.ai | $0.72 | $0.27 | -63% |
 RunPod Secure Cloud | $0.74 | $0.50 | -32% |
What each one runs, and what a million tokens costs
Weights + KV cache at 8K context + overhead against 90% of each card's memory. Where a model needs more than one card the cell says how many and prices the set at today's median. $/M tokens is the hourly median divided by estimated single-stream output, from memory bandwidth — an estimate for ranking, not a benchmark.
| Model | Bits | RTX 4090 | RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3 | 4-bit | 74× GPU$44.40/hr | 74× GPU$18.50/hr |
| Kimi K3 | 16-bit | 260× GPU$156.00/hr | 260× GPU$65.00/hr |
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash | 4-bit | 15× GPU$9.00/hr | 15× GPU$3.75/hr |
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash | 16-bit | 52× GPU$31.20/hr | 52× GPU$13.00/hr |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 4-bit | 11× GPU$6.60/hr | 11× GPU$2.75/hr |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 16-bit | 38× GPU$22.80/hr | 38× GPU$9.50/hr |
| gpt-oss-120b | 4-bit | 4× GPU$2.40/hr | 4× GPU$1.00/hr |
| gpt-oss-120b | 16-bit | 11× GPU$6.60/hr | 11× GPU$2.75/hr |
| Llama 3.1 70B | 4-bit | 3× GPU$1.80/hr | 3× GPU$0.75/hr |
| Llama 3.1 70B | 16-bit | 7× GPU$4.20/hr | 7× GPU$1.75/hr |
| Gemma 4 31B | 4-bit | ✓ 21.2 GB~46 tok/s · $3.62/M | ✓ 21.2 GB~43 tok/s · $1.61/M |
| Gemma 4 31B | 16-bit | 4× GPU$2.40/hr | 4× GPU$1.00/hr |
| Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B | 4-bit | ✓ 19 GB~434 tok/s · $0.38/M | ✓ 19 GB~403 tok/s · $0.17/M |
| Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B | 16-bit | 3× GPU$1.80/hr | 3× GPU$0.75/hr |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 4-bit | ✓ 18.7 GB~53 tok/s · $3.14/M | ✓ 18.7 GB~49 tok/s · $1.42/M |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 16-bit | 3× GPU$1.80/hr | 3× GPU$0.75/hr |
| gpt-oss-20b | 4-bit | ✓ 13.7 GB~398 tok/s · $0.42/M | ✓ 13.7 GB~370 tok/s · $0.19/M |
| gpt-oss-20b | 16-bit | 3× GPU$1.80/hr | 3× GPU$0.75/hr |
| Llama 3.1 8B | 4-bit | ✓ 6.9 GB~179 tok/s · $0.93/M | ✓ 6.9 GB~166 tok/s · $0.42/M |
| Llama 3.1 8B | 16-bit | ✓ 18.4 GB~50 tok/s · $3.33/M | ✓ 18.4 GB~47 tok/s · $1.48/M |
Buy or rent?
Hours of renting at today's median that add up to the card's approximate list price. List prices are typical quoted figures, not tracked, and do not include the server, power or the person to run it — so the break-even is a floor, not a verdict.
Questions
Is the RTX 4090 or the RTX 3090 cheaper to rent?
On 2026-09-18 the RTX 4090 has a market median of $0.60 per GPU-hour across 13 providers and the RTX 3090 $0.25 across 7, so the RTX 3090 is 58% cheaper per hour. Among the 7 providers that price both, the RTX 4090 is cheaper at 0 and the RTX 3090 at 7. Per hour is only half the answer — the table below prices a whole model on each.
Which should I rent for a 70B model?
At 4-bit, Llama 3.1 70B needs about 44.5 GB. On the RTX 4090 that is 3 cards at $1.80/hr; on the RTX 3090 3 cards at $0.75/hr.
What is the real difference between them?
24 GB GDDR6X at 1,008 GB/s (Ada Lovelace) against 24 GB GDDR6X at 936 GB/s (Ampere). Memory decides what fits; bandwidth decides how fast it generates, because each token streams the active weights once. Compute matters for prompt processing and training, not for how fast text appears.