RTX 3090 vs A100 - GPU Benchmark Comparison

Direct performance comparison between the RTX 3090 and A100 across 20 standardized AI benchmarks collected from our production fleet. Testing shows the RTX 3090 winning 3 out of 20 benchmarks (15% win rate), while the A100 wins 17 tests. All 20 benchmark results are automatically gathered from active rental servers, providing real-world performance data rather than synthetic testing.

LLM Inference Performance: RTX 3090 roughly equal performance

In language model inference testing across 8 different models, the RTX 3090 performs nearly identically to the A100, with less than 10% average difference. For qwen3-coder:30b inference, the RTX 3090 achieves 132 tokens/s compared to A100's 115 tokens/s, making the RTX 3090 noticeably faster with a 15% advantage. Overall, the RTX 3090 wins 1 out of 8 LLM tests with an average 9% performance difference, making the A100 the better option for LLM inference tasks.

Image Generation Performance: RTX 3090 42% slower

Evaluating AI image generation across 12 different Stable Diffusion models, the RTX 3090 is 42% slower than the A100 in this category. When testing sd3.5-medium, the RTX 3090 completes generations at 2.1 images/min while the A100 achieves 8.9 images/min, making the RTX 3090 substantially slower with a 76% deficit. Across all 12 image generation benchmarks, the RTX 3090 wins 2 tests with an average 42% performance difference, making the A100 the better choice for Stable Diffusion, SDXL, and Flux workloads.

About These Benchmarks of RTX 3090 vs A100

Our benchmarks are collected automatically from servers having gpus of type RTX 3090 and A100 in our fleet using standardized test suites:

LLM Inference (Ollama & VLLM): Measures tokens per second of RTX 3090 compared to A100 for LLM inference using various models (Llama, Qwen, etc.) on both Ollama and VLLM with FP8 quantization
Image Generation: Measures images per minute and seconds per image for AI image generation on the RTX 3090 compared to A100
CPU: Single-core and multi-core operations per second representing GPU Servers you can rent with RTX 3090 or A100
NVMe: Read and write speeds in MB/s for storage performance on GPU Servers typically equipped with RTX 3090 or A100

Note: RTX 3090 and A100 AI Benchmark Results may vary based on system load, configuration, and specific hardware revisions. These benchmarks represent median values from multiple test runs of RTX 3090 and A100.