As promised, Nvidia unveiled this Wednesday, September 20 during a new online conference its latest GPUs under Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 4080 and 4090.
As expected, Nvidia took advantage of GTC 2022 to officially present its new GPUs: the RTX 4080 and 4090. These two high-end graphics cards are based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture (in reference to the first computer programmer in history) engraved in 4 nm.
First let’s start with the RTX 4080. Available in November (no precise date for the moment), it will be offered in two models equipped with 12 or 16 G0 of GDDR6X RAM. According to the manufacturer, it would be 2 to 4 times faster than the RTX 3080 Ti.
RTX 4080: it buries the 3080 Ti
The first version will be available from 899 dollars. Here are its specificities:
- 7,680 CUDA cores
- 2.31 GHz base clock, boost up to 2.61 GHz
- 639 Tensor-TFLOPs
- 92 RayTracing-TFLOPs
- 40 Shader-TFLOPS
- 700W minimum power supply
As for the model equipped with 16 G0 of RAM, displayed from 1199 dollars, here are its characteristics:
- 9,728 CUDA cores
- 2.21 GHz base clock, boost up to 2.51 GHz
- 780 Tensor-TFLOPs
- 113 RayTracing-TFLOPs
- 49 Shader-TFLOPs
- 750W minimum power supply
RTX 4090: raw power
Next we come to the Rolls-Royce, namely the RTX 4090. The high-end card will be available from October 12, 2022 at a price of 1599 dollars. It will come with a monstrous amount of RAM, namely 24 GB of GDDR6X RAM. According to the manufacturer, it will offer 2 to 4 times better performance than the RTX 3090 Ti, while displaying similar power consumption. Nvidia, however, recommends a power supply at least 850 W based on a PC equipped with a Ryzen 5900X. Here are its technical specifications:
- 76 billion transistors
- 16,384 CUDA cores
- 2.23 GHz base clock, boost up to 2.52 GHz
- 1,321 Tensor-TFLOPs
- 191 RT-TFLOPs
- 83 Shader-TFLOPs
DLSS 3.0 makes its debut
Also according to the manufacturer, the RTX 4090 is up to 4 times faster on Ray Tracing compatible games than the RTX 3090 Ti, in particular thanks to the support for the DLSS 3.0. Indeed, with this generation, the green team significantly increases performance with Ray Tracing, while integrating the 3rd version of DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling.
“The era of Ray Tracing RTX and neural rendering is thriving, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the GeForce Beyond conference. This new version of DLSS benefits in particular from an innovation integrated into the latest Nvidia GPUs: the Ada Optical Flow accelerator. Simply put, this technology allows DLSS to predict movement in a scene, allowing the neural network to increase frames per second while maintaining optimal image quality.
According to Nvidia, more than 35 games are or will be compatible with DLSS 3.0 when they are released. We note in the list of titles such as A Plague Tale: Requiem, Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Portal With RTX (a brand new version of the game), The Witcher 3, STALKER 2, or even Hitman 3 and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.
An armada of technological innovations
To encourage gamers to checkout, Nvidia has incorporated many technological innovations on its new GPUs. Here is the list:
- streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 TFLOPs of power per shader
- Dedicated 3rd Gen RT cores with up to 191 TFLOPs of RT efficiency, 2.8x more than the previous generation
- 4th generation Tensor cores with up to 1.32 petaflops of Tensor (5x more than previous generation thanks to FP8 acceleration)
- architectural enhancements closely coupled with TSMC’s 4nm process technology double power efficiency
Shader Execution Reordering (SER) remains the most exciting innovation. This technology improves execution efficiency by rearranging shading workloads on the fly to better utilize GPU resources. Thanks to this process, Ray-Tracing performance is tripled while the in-game framerate is increased by up to 25%.
To conclude, the green team will obviously offer its GPUs in Founders Edition. “For our new GeForce RTX 40 Series Founders Edition graphics cards, we have further optimized the Dual Axial Flow Through system, increasing the size of the fans and the volume of the fins by 10%”, says Andrew Burnes, Nvidia technical marketing manager.