Today, Nvidia officially unveiled its RTX 40-series GPUs. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are officially official after months of speculation and some recent tease from Nvidia. The RTX 4090 will be available on October 12th for $1,599, while the RTX 4080 will be available for $1,199 with no release date yet. Both use Nvidia’s next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture.
The RTX 4080 is available in two variants, one with 12GB of GDDR6X memory and another with 16GB of GDDR6X memory, and Nvidia says it is 2-4x faster than the current RTX 3080 Ti.
The RTX 4090 is the most expensive card in the Lovelace generation. It will come with a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X RAM. Nvidia says it is 2-4 times quicker than the RTX 3090 Ti, and it will be available on October 12th.
Ada Lovelace is the third generation of RTX, named after the English mathematician and novelist. It is intended to significantly enhance ray tracing while also supporting Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3.0. This new architecture will also serve as the basis for Nvidia’s next-generation consumer GPUs.
Nvidia debuted its third-generation Ada Lovelace RTX architecture today with a Racer X demo, which simulates an off-road kart racing game. The Racer X demo was powered by a single Ada Lovelace GPU with 76 billion transistors and manufactured on TSMC’s 4nm technology.
Ada Lovelace also incorporates third-generation RT cores, which are intended to increase ray tracing significantly. A new DLSS 3.0 AI that analyses the current frame and the previous frame to determine how game scenes are changing contributes to some of the improvements. DLSS 3.0 enabled Nvidia to more than double Microsoft Flight Simulator frame rates.
The release of the RTX 40-series cards comes at a difficult moment for Nvidia and the GPU industry as a whole. The crypto crisis impacted GPU demand, and more recently, the predominance of GPU-based crypto mining has decreased as a result of Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake. Nvidia’s gaming revenue fell by a whopping $1 billion in its most recent earnings report.
The emphasis of Nvidia’s launch is on its first-party “Founders Edition” graphics cards, although they will be marketed alongside GPUs from hardware partners such as Asus and Gigabyte. These third-party GPU models utilize the same Nvidia processors as the originals, however, they may be configured differently and have different cooling. However, don’t expect to see RTX 40-series GPUs from EVGA, which recently declared that it will no longer manufacture Nvidia graphics cards due to the chipmaker’s terrible conduct.
Despite the fact that its replacement is officially official, earlier RTX 30-series GPUs are expected to be accessible for some time. Nvidia confessed earlier this year that it developed too many GPUs and was forced to modify retail prices owing to surplus inventories. This led to RTX 30-series cards being available at MSRP after years of price increases by resellers, which was a pleasant sight for cash-strapped PC gamers.
