Nvidia has announced its latest generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards at its GTC AI conference. The Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are the first GPUs from the ‘Ada Lovelace’ series, and they should be up to twice as fast as their last-gen counterparts in rasterised games – and up to four times as fast in ray-traced games.
The RTX 4090 24GB will be available on October 12th and costs $1599/£1679, while the RTX 4080 16GB arrives in November and costs $1199/£1269. There’s also an RTX 4080 12GB model that costs $899/£949. The 4090 and 4080 are reportedly two to four times faster than their Ampere equivalents, which are the 3090 Ti and the 3080 Ti, respectively.
| RTX 4090 24GB | RTX 4080 16GB | RTX 4080 12GB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | AD102 | AD103 | AD104 |
| Transistors | 76B | ? | ? |
| Die size | 611mm² | 380mm² | 380mm² |
| CUDA cores | 16384 | 9728 | 7680 |
| Boost clock | 2.52GHz | 2.51GHz | 2.61GHz |
| Memory interface | 384-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 1018GB/s | 742GB/s | 557GB/s |
| Power usage | 450W | 320W | 285W |
| PSU requirement | 850W | 750W | 700W |
| PSU cables | 3x 8-pin | 3x 8-pin | 2x 8-pin |
| Price | $1499/£1649 | $1199/£1269 | $899/£949 |
| Release date | October 12th, 2022 | November, 2022 | November, 2022 |
Note that Nvidia RTX 30-series cards will remain on sale for the moment, filling in the bottom part of the market until lower-tier RTX 40-series GPUs arrive.
So how are these GPUs so fast? Well, the 40-series GPUs use TSMC’s ‘4N’ process and boast up to 76 billion transistors and up to 18,000 CUDA cores, 70 percent more than were in last-gen Ampere. The new process allows the generation to be significantly more power-efficient too, although we expect the flagship cards to be as power-hungry as rumoured – you’re just getting a ton of extra performance to offset that in efficiency terms.