Nvidia has unveiled the first two GPUs in its long-awaited GeForce RTX 40 series, the new GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080. Based on the new ‘Ada Lovelace’ architecture, these high-end models promise up to 4X performance. Improved power efficiency along with the previous ‘Ampere’ architecture. Nvidia has also announced its new DLSS3 image upscaling technology, which is said to be capable of generating full frames independent of the PC’s CPU. The company says its third-gen ray tracing cores and fourth-gen tensor cores accelerate ray tracing and floating-point acceleration that enable the “age of neural rendering.”
Nvidia has announced that graphics cards based on the GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 will be designed and sold by partner brands including Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI, Innovision 3D, Palit, Colorful, and others. These will include stock and factory-overclocked models. However, there is no mention of any Founders Edition cards sold by Nvidia. Pre-built PCs using these GPUs will also be available from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Alienware and more.
The new flagship GeForce RTX 4090 GPU has a total of 76 billion transistors. It has 16,384 CUDA cores and the card will have 24GB of GDDR6X RAM. Power consumption is pegged at 450W. With DLSS3 enabled, this GPU is said to be 4X faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS2. Nvidia promises a consistent >100fps frame rate at 4K in today’s games. The GeForce RTX 4090 cards will be available worldwide starting October 12th, and Nvidia has a suggested price of $1,599 (about Rs 1,27,575 before taxes), though partners will set their own prices.
Confusingly, the two versions of the GeForce RTX 4080 will have different CUDA core counts as well as the amount of RAM. The GeForce RTX 4080 16GB has 9,728 CUDA cores while the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB has 7,680 cores. Both should be faster than the previous generation GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Suggested prices are $1,199 (approx. Rs. 95,650) and $899 (approx. Rs. 71,725) respectively.
While new mid-range and affordable GPUs have yet to be announced, the drop in prices of previous-gen models as a result of the drop in demand for GPU mining due to the introduction of the new high-end GeForce 40 series and the recent Ethereum merge may come. Already, second-hand GPUs are appearing
DLSS3 is coming to Frostbite, Unreal and Unity game engines, along with over 35 games and creative apps, including Hogwarts Legacy, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Cyberpunk 2077. Nvidia says it can overcome CPU power limits by generating full frames. New architecture-level capabilities include on-the-fly shader execution reordering for improved efficiency and 3X better performance, as well as the Ada Optical Flow Accelerator that helps predict movement between frames on the screen.
The new architecture allows dual NVENC media encoders to work together to potentially cut export times in half. AV1 encoding is supported. Streamers can better make use of virtual backgrounds and modders can use the new RTX Remix tool to add ray tracing effects to the “remastered” classic game.
Nvidia’s own Lightspeed studio just ahead of its 15th anniversary has remixed the cult classic game Portal with ray tracing to give it a facelift. It will be available as a free, official DLC in November.
