Virtually any contemporary game with maximum settings will struggle to maintain 4k120 without a sacrifice on my 3090. Cranking the render scale in WoW to 6K or 8K (retail or Classic) will easily push the GPU to 100% and drop fps to around 60.

Gaming-wise, I think the 3090 struggles at 8k and 4k 144hz gaming, which is very high end gaming experience and people that spend the money on those monitors will spend the money on the 4090.

For other purposes (like scientific computing/ml), while 3090 can do a lot of things that 4090 does, it's half the speed (or even slower) and a lot less energy efficient, say 1x4090 = 2x3090, 4090 uses 450W, dual 3090 uses 700W, of course you can power limit both of them further, but you still get best bang for your buck out of the 4090.

Also VR. I know VR people with a 3090 who grumble about it not really being fast enough for them.

What games are they running?! While I know not top of the line - I can run the HTC VIVE pro 2 at 5k@120hz at max visual settings in beatsaber on a 2060 based gaming laptop.

>beatsaber

Beatsaber is a great game but the graphics aren't very stressful (nor do they need to be).

Keep in mind people are also starting to mod VR into more and more new PC games that were never designed for it. Stuff like Elden Ring, FF7R, the Resident Evil remakes, etc.

What's your experience with HalfLife Alyx?

90+ fps on an rtx 2070 super egpu

For ML, the bottleneck is often memory, which is the same between those cards.