Today marks the official launch of Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are officially released following months of speculation and a recent tease from Nvidia. The RTX 4090 will be available on October 12th for $1,599, while the RTX 4080 will go on sale in November starting at $899. The next-generation Lovelace architecture from Nvidia powers both.
The top card for the Ada Lovelace generation is the RTX 4090. Massive 24GB of GDDR6X RAM will be included in the box. It will use the same amount of power as the RTX 3090 Ti while, according to Nvidia, being 2-4 times quicker. Based on a PC with a Ryzen 5900X processor, Nvidia advises a power supply of at least 850 watts.
16,384 CUDA Cores, a base frequency of 2.23GHz that can be increased to 2.52GHz, 1,321 Tensor-TFLOPs, 191 RT-TFLOPs, and 83 Shader-TFLOPs are all found inside the massive RTX 4090.
The RTX 4080 is available from Nvidia in two variations, one with 12GB of GDDR6X memory and the other with 16GB of GDDR6X memory. According to Nvidia, these variations are 2-4 times faster than the RTX 3080 Ti. With 7,680 CUDA Cores, a 2.31GHz base clock can be increased to 2.61GHz, 639 Tensor-TFLOPs, 92 RT-TFLOPs, and 40 Shader-TFLOPs, the 12GB variant has a starting price of $899.
In November, the two RTX 4080 variants will go on sale. However, the 16GB RTX 4080 is more than just an increase in memory. With 9,728 CUDA Cores, a base clock of 2.21GHz that can be increased to 2.51GHz, 780 Tensor-TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader-TFLOPs of power, it is more powerful and starts at $1,199. A power source of at least 700 watts is needed for the 12GB RTX 4080 variant, and at least 750 watts is required for the 16GB model.
New Nvidia ShadowPlay support will be available on all three of these RTX 40-series graphics cards, allowing users to record gameplay at up to 8K resolution at 60 FPS in HDR. Additionally, Nvidia is utilizing its most recent encoders (NVENC), which have increased efficiency and support for AV1 encoding.
Without Nvidia's Founders Edition graphics cards, the new RTX launch would not be complete. The graphics cards with their internal design, the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 (16GB), will be sold by Nvidia. The firm has once again improved its design.
According to Andrew Burnes, technical marketing at Nvidia, "with our new GeForce RTX 40 Series Founders Edition graphics cards, we've further refined the Dual Axial Flow Through system, increasing fan diameters and fin volume by 10%, and upgrading to a 23-phase power supply." The new, significantly more powerful Ada GPUs are kept cool in vented enclosures, offering gamers excellent room to overclock. Memory temps are decreased.
Instead of using the unique method, it developed for its own RTX 30-series Founders Edition GPUs, Nvidia is supporting the PCIe Gen-5 16-pin connector with its own RTX 40-series cards. It also powers 40-series cards with a single cable, but you can also connect three 8-pin power connectors with the adaptor in the box. Nvidia advises connecting the fourth one for "additional overclocking space."
In October, ATX 3.0 power supplies from Asus, Cooler Master, FSP, Gigabyte, iBuyPower, MSI, and Thermaltake will go on sale. These supplies will come with native compatibility for PCIe Gen-5 16-pin connectors. Soon, further models are anticipated from other manufacturers as well.
The third generation of RTX that drives the RTX 4080 and RTX 3090 is named Ada Lovelace, after the English mathematician and author. It is intended to support Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3 and significantly enhances ray tracing.
Today, Nvidia unveiled Racer RTX, a simulation of an off-road kart racing game, as the first demonstration of its third-generation Ada Lovelace RTX architecture. One Ada Lovelace GPU, which has 76 billion transistors and is constructed using TSMC's 4nm process, provided power for the Racer RTX demo.
Third-generation RT cores are another feature of Ada Lovelace that is intended to significantly enhance ray tracing. A new DLSS 3 AI that analyzes the new and previous frames to determine how game scenes evolve is responsible for some improvements. Using DLSS 3, Nvidia showed that Microsoft Flight Simulator frame rates more than doubled. This improved frame generation should allow DLSS 3 to increase frame rates even when the CPU is the game's bottleneck.
More than 35 games and apps will support DLSS 3, according to Nvidia, with the first games supporting it in October. As Nvidia releases the RTX 4090 and two variants of the RTX 4080 in the upcoming months, we'll need to test all of the company's boasts.
Nvidia and the GPU market are facing difficulties introducing the RTX 40-series card. The crypto crisis has reduced GPU demand, and more recently, the prevalence of GPU-based crypto mining has fallen due to Ethereum switching to proof of stake. In its most recent reports, Nvidia saw a startling $1 billion decline in gaming sales.
