NVIDIA is shaping its GeForce RTX 40 series. The 4090 will go on sale on October 12, followed by two versions of the 4080 in November.
After months of waiting and disagreements between partners, the NVIDIA Series 40 GPUs are finally here. The company formalized the GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 during its GTC 2022 keynote. Claiming that they take advantage of the Ada Lovelace architecture, these two GPUs provide the best ray tracing performance. The founder worked with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to develop a new “4N”manufacturing process that is nearly twice as efficient as the 8nm process used for Series 30.
NVIDIA formalizes GeForce RTX Series 40 release
The increase in ray tracing performance is due to Ada Lovelace, which uses the third generation of NVIDIA’s RT cores and the integration of a new rendering method called Shader Execution Reordering and DLSS 3.0. In some games, performance can be doubled or tripled with ray tracing compared to Ampere GPUs. The company demoed Cyberpunk 2077 at a nearly constant 100fps with all ray tracing features at max. With this new architecture, rasterization performance is also doubled.
4090 arrives October 12th.
Ada Lovelace’s first GPU is coming next month on October 12th, it’s a GeForce RTX 4090 priced at $1599 but in Europe I think it’s €1949. With 24GB of GDDR6X memory, NVIDIA claims it is two to four times faster than the 3090 Ti at the same power consumption. There are 16,384 CUDA cores inside with a base clock of 2.2GHz.
Alongside the 4090, NVIDIA will offer two variants of the RTX 4080. The base model, priced between €899 and €1,099, offers 12GB of GDDR6X, while the 16GB version will cost between €1,199 and €1,469. Both will arrive in November. However, NVIDIA will only sell the Founders Edition variant of the more expensive model. For a 12 GB version, you will need to contact the company’s partners.
Two versions of the 4080 followed in November.
In terms of performance, the 16GB 4080 has 9728 CUDA cores and a clock speed of 2.21GHz with a maximum boost of 2.51GHz. At the same time, the 12 GB model contains only 7680, but with a frequency of 100 MHz higher. Luckily, you won’t have to change the PSU if you’re going to replace the 3070 or 3080, NVIDIA recommends 700W for the 12GB version and 750W for the 16GB version. If you want to replace the PSU, wait until ATX 3.0 is up in a few months. Founders Edition models will be compatible with the 16-pin PCIe Gen-5 standard. That being said, NVIDIA will also include an 8-pin adapter for those who don’t want to fiddle with cables.
Series 40 GPUs are entering a difficult environment for the company. During most of the pandemic, it was almost impossible to buy the latest GeForce GPUs at fair prices, as there was a lot of demand for them from gamers and cryptocurrency miners. Today, the situation has changed a lot with the collapse of the crypto market and the transition to Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. The used market was then flooded with Series 30 GPUs, making it nearly impossible for partners and resellers to offer their graphics cards at suggested retail prices.