L4 vs RTX 3090: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the L4 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3090 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Both the L4 and the RTX 3090 ship with 24 GB of VRAM.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. L4 from $0.649/GPU/hr; RTX 3090 from $0.185/GPU/hr. The RTX 3090 is 72% cheaper at the entry rate.
L4
Good for inference and light fine-tuning workloads
RTX 3090
Good for inference and small-scale training workloads
Last updated: 2026-10-10 22:01:32 UTCRefreshes hourly
Specs side by side
| Spec | L4 | RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 24 GB | 24 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 300 GB/s | 936 GB/s |
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere |
| Compute capability | 8.9 | 8.6 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | – | 142 TFLOPS |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | – | NVLink, 2-way |
| Max board power (TDP) | 72W | 350W |
| Form factor | – | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| Regions | 1 | 4 |
On-demand price
| Rate | L4 | RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $0.649/GPU/hr | $0.550/GPU/hr |
Which is better for AI: L4 or RTX 3090?
Choose the L4 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3090 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
L4 vs RTX 3090: common questions
Is the L4 or the RTX 3090 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the L4 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3090 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Is the L4 or the RTX 3090 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the L4 starts at $0.649/GPU/hr (median $0.649/GPU/hr) and the RTX 3090 starts at $0.185/GPU/hr (median $0.242/GPU/hr). The RTX 3090 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 72%.
What is the difference between the L4 and the RTX 3090?
Both cards report 24 GB of VRAM; the L4 is an Ada Lovelace part and the RTX 3090 is Ampere (compute capability 8.9 vs 8.6); only the L4 supports FP8 compute. On price, the L4 lists from $0.649/GPU/hr and the RTX 3090 from $0.185/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the L4 and the RTX 3090?
The L4 is listed in 1 region and the RTX 3090 in 4 regions right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the L4 vs the RTX 3090?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $649 on the L4 and $185 on the RTX 3090, a difference of $464 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the L4 have compared to the RTX 3090?
Both the L4 and the RTX 3090 ship with 24 GB of VRAM.
Does the L4 or the RTX 3090 support NVLink?
The RTX 3090 supports NVLink, 2-way; the L4 has no dedicated GPU-to-GPU interconnect.
How this comparison is calculated
Every price is normalized to a per-GPU hourly rate using the same pipeline as every other pricing surface on Aquanode, and only the cheapest qualifying offer per provider is shown. A dash means that provider does not currently list that GPU.
Architecture, compute capability and supported precisions come from each vendor's published datasheet for that generation, not from the marketplace feed. This page regenerates at most once per hour.
Memory bandwidth, tensor TFLOPS, NVLink/interconnect and max board power are the same verified-from-datasheet figures shown on each model's own L4 page and RTX 3090 page, which link the primary vendor source for that model. A dash here means Aquanode hasn't verified that figure from a primary source yet, never a guess.
Go further
Check what fits in each card's memory with the L4 VRAM calculator and the RTX 3090 VRAM calculator, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More L4 comparisons
More RTX 3090 comparisons
Related reading: L4 pricing and specs, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
