NVIDIA has announced its biennial major refresh of its consumer graphics card line-up with the first RTX 4000 series GPUs – the RTX 4090 arriving on October 12th at $1,599 and the RTX 4080 in November starting at $899.
Both are powered by next-gen 4nm Ada Lovelace architecture with the 4090 boasting 24GB of GDDR6X memory, 16,384 CUDA Cores, a base clock of 2.23GHz that boosts up to 2.52GHz, 1,321 Tensor-TFLOPs, 191 RT-TFLOPs, and 83 Shader-TFLOPs.
What does that mean in performance terms? Nvidia claims it is 2-4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti and boasts ray-traced scenes running 2-3x faster. The main promise it seems to be able to deliver is consistent 4K gaming with ray tracing at over 100FPS.
A new feature is DLSS 3 which will be exclusive to 40-series graphics cards. This uses an Optical Flow Accelerator and data from sequential frames to create new frames on the GPU itself to improve frame rates by up to 4x along with bypassing any CPU bottlenecks that affect traditional upsampling and image reconstruction methods.
Over 35 games have been announced with support for this feature, including “Microsoft Flight Simulator” and “Cyberpunk 2077” with the latter offering a clip showing how far the new cards can push ray tracing. Speed tests with DLSS 3 showed frame rates more than doubling in “Flight Simulator” and more than quadrupling in “Cyberpunk 2077”.
Also released is a clip of “Portal” with real-time ray tracing. That update will be launching in November and be available free to all existing “Portal” PC owners.
Source: Nvidia
