Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series: price, specs, release date and more for the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090

Nvidia sticks with high-end goods for Announcement of GeForce RTX 40 seriesrevealed their next generation of graphics cards with only the flagship RTX 4090 and two versions of the RTX 4080. All three are coming with varying degrees of price difference vs. RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, although Nvidia thinks the performance and feature improvements of the 40 series’ Ada Lovelace architecture will make them worthwhile investments. Especially with support for DLSS 3, a new and significantly upgraded version of Nvidia’s DLSS the upgrade kit will only work with the RTX 40 GPU at launch.

Indeed, while the next generation of AMD RDNA 3 / Radeon RX 7000 series The GPU is clearly focused on improving performance, the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are both geared towards power-ups and AI-powered performance tricks. Personally I still hope the less financially devastating members of the RTX 40 family – GPUs like RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 still a number best graphics card you can buy – but for now, here’s everything you need to know about the cards confirmed so far.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series price

It is also possible to solve this problem quickly, as the price of the RTX 40 series is (so far) quite worth it:

• RTX 4080 12GB: £949 / $899
• RTX 4080 16GB: £1269 / $1199
• RTX 4090: £1679 / $1599

…YES. For comparison, the RTX 3080 launched at $649 / $699, while the RTX 3090 was priced at $1400 / $1500, and since this is Nvidia’s starting price, most of the assembly’s partner versions admin will keep you coming back for more. The RTX 4090 and the 16GB version of the RTX 4080 will feature Nvidia-designed Founders Edition models, which will sell for the prices listed above, but the ‘cheapest’ 12GB RTX 4080 could easily break the £1000/$1000 mark through a partner card like Good.

To add, Asus, Colorful, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac are all producing their own RTX 40 series models. Not EVGA, remember, who is give up the graphics card business completelyciting uncooperative behavior on the part of Nvidia.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series release date

The RTX 4090 will go on sale on October 12, 2022; here’s hope, for the benefit of anyone looking to drop cash right away, it’s not a tooth grinding launch day compared to the already existing RTX 3080 when it sold out in seconds in 2020.

There’s no specific RTX 4080 release date at the time of writing, though Nvidia says both the 12GB and 16GB variants will launch in November. If there’s an RTX 4070 and/or an RTX 4060 in the works, don’t expect it. them a little longer.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Series Specifications

As it happens, calling the 12GB and 16GB RTX 4080s two versions of the same GPU is technically incorrect: the 12GB model is based on the other base Ada Lovelace chip, the Nvidia AD104, with the 16GB RTX 4080 and processor. its AD103 handler. You can see in this spec sheet a full comparison of the two, along with the AD102-based RTX 4090.

There are obviously some significant differences between the 12GB and 16GB RTX 4080s, going beyond the amount of memory they have in ol’ noggin. And it’s not just prices that are going up, as the RTX 4090 now has the same quoted power usage and PSU power requirements as RTX 3090 Ti – though conversely, if you already have an RTX 3080 and buy its recommended 750W PSU, you won’t need to upgrade the latter for either RTX 4080.

In terms of upgrades, Ada Lovelace looks like a huge architectural step up from the Ampere design of the RTX 30 series. The RT and Tensor cores (which enable ray tracing and AI/machine learning tools like DLSS) have both been redesigned to be faster and more efficient. You also just get more of that than Ampere, and the CUDA core count – considering these are the core workhorses for running the game on a daily basis – is higher across the board.

The RTX 40 series won’t take advantage of the PCIe 5.0 slots on next-gen motherboards, as Nvidia says PCIe 4.0 can still provide these cards with ample bandwidth. That’s good – even if it’s coming out AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU and chipset, support for PCIe 5.0 graphics on motherboards won’t be the norm in a few years. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080s will also work in the PCIe 3.0 slots of older mobos.

Features of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series

Faster, more cores are welcome, but if the RTX 40 series turns out to be worth the money, it will most likely be thanks to its massive feature upgrades.

The coolest of all is DLSS 3. If you’re new to it, DLSS in its current form (latest version is 2.4) improves in-game performance by rendering each frame at a lower resolution, due to that uses less horsepower. It then applies custom upscaling and anti-aliasing – both created by Nvidia that teaches AI algorithms how to best produce images – to make each frame look like the display’s native resolution. your. It’s brilliant, most of the time, and DLSS 3 takes it a step further by inserting new, entirely AI-generated frames in between each ‘real’ rendered frame.

In theory, this should produce a much better fps gain than previous versions of DLSS could. Overall, every frame could be better too: the Ada Lovelace architecture includes a new “Optical Flow Accelerator” that aims to reduce impact on subjects while the camera is in motion. This is a rare but unsightly weakness of upgrade software such as DLSS and AMD FSRand by combining this Optical Flow engine with motion vectors (data from surrounding frames detailing how images change between them), DLSS 3 promises to make games Upgrades look clearer and sharper.

Drawbacks? One is that only a small fraction of games that support (or will support) older DLSS versions will support DLSS 3 also. New framing also increases input lag, which can be partially balanced with Nvidia Reflection but could compromise the usefulness of DLSS 3 in competitive situations. Finally, DLSS 3 is so dependent on this new Optical Stream Accelerator that older GeForce RTX GPUs, i.e. the RTX 30 series and RTX 20 series, will not be able to use the new upgrade when it launches with new cards. Nvidia doesn’t rule out eventually making DLSS 3 available to all RTX GPUs, like previous versions, although some more engineering will be needed towards their end. In short, this is the RTX 40 series dedicated to the present time.

Ray tracing is also getting an upgrade, specifically in the way the Ada Lovelace GPU handles numbers when rendering ray tracing graphics. I don’t think I can explain this without getting annoyed in the slightest, but bear with me.

So graphics processors work best when they perform many of the same tasks in quick succession; In other words, drawing an object with multiple instances of repeating textures is faster than drawing an object with fewer textures, but with more variety and uniqueness. What kind? SSD faster when reading stored data sequentially. A big part of why ray tracing slows down game performance so much is that it requires the GPU to work at its potential. millions separate tasks, enough that developers can’t arrange them manually in a processor-friendly way.

However, the RTX 40 series can use a technique called Shader Execution Reordering. This allows the GPU itself to arrange these tasks in a neat, beautiful row, allowing itself to tackle them more efficiently. Nvidia says this can improve overall performance with RT enabled by up to 25% over Ampere, which won’t completely eliminate the FPS tax in most games but will certainly make them run. more smoothly.

The RTX 40 GPU will also have AV1 encoding as standard. This won’t make your game run faster, but it’s good news if you’re streaming or creating video from game footage: the AV1 format beats current-generation formats in terms of picture quality. and data usage. That’s bad news for Intel, though, as AV1 encoding looks like a real USP that’s long overdue for them. Arc Alchemist graphics card. So much for that advantage.

What is RTX Remix and what does it have to do with the RTX 40 series?

The launch of the RTX 4090 / RTX 4080 attracted a lot of Nvidia showing off its new RTX Remix app. Probably not too much – if it works as intended, the RTX Remix can be a huge deal for modifying older PC games.

The idea is that RTX Remix uses Ada Lovelace’s AI/machine learning features to streamline the process of creating HD mod packs for older games in bulk. With it, modders can import a game into the app and ‘capture’ assets (like textures, geometry, and lighting) with a few clicks. These assets are then automatically converted to the USD (Universal Scene Description) file format, allowing modifiers to make changes using RTX Remix’s various tools.

These include AI-powered texture generators that can enhance textures up to 4x or detect the type of material an old texture is supposed to represent – wood, metal, etc – and automatically dynamic gives them a more detailed, consistent roughness or gloss. All can apply ray tracing effects, Nvidia Reflex, and DLSS 3 support, and by syncing RTX Remix with other apps like Blender, Maya, Photoshop, and Adobe Substance, you can create complete models all new and watch them take shape inside the mod in real time.

Once done, RTX Remix can export everything as a mod pack, just unpack in the same folder as the game’s .exe to launch. Multiple games can work with this: Nvidia says the only requirement is that they be DirectX 8 or 9 based and use a fixed-function graphics pipeline.

So, where does the special RTX 40 series appear? For starters, you’ll need one of these Ada Lovelace GPUs to run RTX Remix; it is not available for older Nvidia graphics cards. And, while the resulting mod packs have no such hardware requirements, features like ray tracing and DLSS 3 are clearly encouraging the use (or, frankly, purchase) of an RTX 4090 or RTX. 4080 on the player side.

Would most modders want to make the transitions that only owners of this brand new, expensive line of graphics cards can fully enjoy? I don’t know, though anything that streamlines a complex process like game modification is likely to appeal to eager new users as much as it can appeal to old veterans. Nvidia is also talking to Nexus Mods and Mod DB about hosting Remix creations, so promoting and finding these mods shouldn’t be any harder than hand-crafted ones.