Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs

Nvidia is officially announcing its RTX 40-series GPUs today. After months of rumors and some recent teasing from Nvidia, the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are now both official. The RTX 4090 arrives on October 12th priced at $1,599, with the RTX 4080 priced at $1,199 and no release date yet. Both are powered by Nvidia’s next-gen Ada Lovelace architecture.

Nvidia is offering the RTX 4080 in two models, one with 12GB of GDDR6X memory and another with 16GB of GDDR6X memory, and Nvidia claims it’s 2-4x faster than the existing RTX 3080 Ti.

The RTX 4090 is the top-end card for the Lovelace generation. It will ship with a massive 24GB of GDDR6X memory. Nvidia claims it’s 2-4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, and it will start shipping on October 12th.

Ada Lovelace, named after the English mathematician and writer, is the third generation of RTX. It’s designed to greatly improve ray tracing and support Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3.0. This new architecture will also form the foundations for Nvidia’s next-gen consumer GPUs.

Nvidia introduced its third-generation Ada Lovelace RTX architecture with a Racer X demo today — a simulation of an off-road kart racing game. The Racer X demo was powered by a single Ada Lovelace GPU, which includes 76 billion transistors and is built on TSMC’s 4nm process.

Ada Lovelace also includes third-generation RT cores that are designed to greatly improve ray tracing. Part of the improvements come down to a new DLSS 3.0 AI that processes the new frame and the prior frame to figure out how game scenes are changing. Nvidia demonstrated Microsoft Flight Simulator frame rates more than doubling using DLSS 3.0.

The launch of RTX 40-series cards comes at a challenging time for Nvidia and the GPU market as a whole. GPU demand has been dampened by the crypto crash, and more recently, the prevalence of GPU-based crypto mining has plummeted thanks to Ethereum’s switch to proof of stake. Nvidia’s gaming revenue dropped by a staggering $1 billion in its latest earnings.

Nvidia’s launch is focused on its first-party “Founders Edition” graphics cards, but these will be sold alongside additional GPUs from hardware partners such as Asus and Gigabyte. These third-party GPU models use the same Nvidia processors but may be configured differently and have different coolers. But don’t expect to see RTX 40-series GPUs from EVGA, which recently announced it would no longer be making Nvidia graphics cards, citing poor behavior from the chip maker.

Although its successor is now official, previous RTX 30-series GPUs are likely to be available for some time to come. Earlier this year, Nvidia admitted it built too many GPUs and was forced to adjust retail pricing due to excess inventory. This resulted in RTX 30-series cards appearing at MSRP after years of price hikes by resellers, a welcome sight for cash-strapped PC gamers.

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