NVIDIA confirms that the GeForce RTX 4090 does not support P2P

Unlike the RTX 6000, the GeForce RTX 4090 does not support P2P. So professionals who want to exploit this multi-GPU functionality should turn to the RTX A6000 or RTX 6000 in particular. This feature was already missing on the RTX 3090.

Two tests by Puget Systems showed that the $1,599 RTX 4090 often performs well as the $6,800 RTX 6000. In an article published in the middle of last week, it discusses several multi-GPU benchmarks on AMD and Intel systems, however, the company reported reported a problem with the P2P function (peer to peer) affecting the GeForce RTX 4090. The author of the article noted some failures but believed that P2P was already available; Finally, an NVIDIA employee commented that the GeForce RTX 4090 does not support P2P.

If for ordinary users P2P above all rhymes with file sharing between two computers, in the case of a GPU it is the same principle, but between two graphics cards. This feature is simply a direct connection between the two GPUs. It allows data to be transferred between the memory cards of the two cards without going through the system memory. An NVIDIA employee on the company’s forums responded to users who questioned the impossibility of enabling P2P: “Hi everyone. We apologize for the delay. Engineering notes indicate that the ‘peer-to-peer’ hardware is not supported by the GeForce RTX 4090. Applications/drivers should not report this card as capable of peer-to-peer communication The issue is fixed and future pilots will report the following instead […] “.

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Thus, this post removes any ambiguity, and emphasizes the fact that, for NVIDIA, GeForce graphics cards are primarily aimed at gamers and the general public. In fact, the GeForce RTX 3090 doesn’t actually support P2P. Moreover, for system integrators and professionals to move towards Quadro or simply RTX GPUs from now on, NVIDIA is also looking at blower versions of the GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 4090.

As we write at the beginning of the article, when you have a GeForce RTX 4090 at $1,599 that’s competitive with an RTX 6000 at $6,800, you’ll have to find a way to steer some customers toward the second, without significantly curbing performance, at the risk of being beaten by the competition. NVIDIA’s strategy, but like Intel’s or AMD’s strategy for other products: restrict certain features. In a purely artificial and arbitrary way in this case, since the RTX 6000s and GeForce RTX 4090s share the same GPU, the AD102.

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