As part of the keynote presentation for NVIDIA’s GTC conference, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang swapped out the kitchen backdrop seen during the RTX 30 series announcement for something more cosmic. After presenting an impressive interactive tech demo built using the latest RTX technologies, we received confirmation that the GeForce RTX4090 and Geforce RTX 4080 Graphics cards will be released in October and November this year. And yes, they are beasts.
And as GeForce RTX 30-series prices drop, the new 40-series cards are aimed at enthusiasts. In other words, they will be expensive at the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 launches. With the RTX 4090 starting at $1,599, the RTX 4080 (16GB) starting at $1,199 and the RTX 4080 (12GB) starting at $899 – two models for the RTX 4080 with different specifications.
Of course, the cost here comes from some seriously impressive hardware, with NVIDIA offering 2x to 4x the performance for the GeForce RTX 4090 compared to the current beast, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Thanks to the advances made with the 3rd gen RTX hardware, the new Ada Lovelace architecture, based on TSMC 4N and the impressive DLSS 3, sounds pretty incredible.
NVIDIA made the announcement by showcasing the fully ray-traced interactive demo Racer RTX (which will be released in November this year). Since it is based on the simulation of real objects, it was apparently put together in just a few months.
Racer RTX showcases the latest NVIDIA technologies including real-time ray tracing, DLSS 3 and PhysX. Available this November as a playable tech demo for GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs, Racer RTX is an interactive, physics-accurate simulation featuring the most realistic RC cars ever made.
And here are all the numbers you need to know about the new GeForce RTX 40 series.
GeForce RTX4090
- NVIDIA architecture: Ada Lovelace
NVIDIA CUDA cores: 16384
Boost Clock (GHz): 2.52
Base clock (GHz): 2.23
Memory: 24GB GDDR6X
Storage interface: 384-bit
Raytracing Cores: 3rd gen
Tensor Cores: 4th gen
Length Width Height: 304 x 137 x 61mm (3 slots)
Perfomance: 450W
Price: $1,599
Geforce RTX 4080
Geforce RTX 4080 (16GB)
- NVIDIA architecture: Ada Lovelace
NVIDIA CUDA cores: 9728
Boost Clock (GHz): 2.51
Base clock (GHz): 2.21
Memory: 16GB GDDR6X
Storage interface: 256-bit
Raytracing Cores: 3rd gen
Tensor Cores: 4th gen
Length/Width/Slit: 304 x 137 x 61mm (3 slots)
Perfomance: 320W
Price: $1,199
Geforce RTX 4080 (12GB)
- NVIDIA architecture: Ada Lovelace
NVIDIA CUDA cores: 7680
Boost Clock (GHz): 2.61
Base clock (GHz): 2.31
Memory: 12GB GDDR6X
Storage interface: 192-bit
Raytracing Cores: 3rd gen
Tensor Cores: 4th gen
Length/Width/Slit: TB
Perfomance: 285W
Price: $899
With massive performance gains compared to the RTX 30 series, the impressive sounding DLSS 3 appears to be exclusive to the GeForce RTX 40 series. That doesn’t sound good to those with 30-series GPUs, but it sounds like DLSS 3 is only possible thanks to the new Optical Flow Accelerator, which uses AI to generate frames and even offload the CPU. NVIDIA presented itself with this look at the CPU-intensive ones Microsoft flight simulatorwhere DLSS 3 more than doubles in-game performance.
It appears that the biggest gains that the Ada-powered GPUs will bring over the Ampere-powered RTX 30 series will come with ray-traced games – where NVIDIA was on hand to demonstrate a 4x increase Cyberpunk 2077 Use a brand new ray tracing mode that takes the already hardware intensive game and adds even more ray tracing detail to the environments.
Cyberpunk 2077’s neon-lit environments are key to its aesthetic, and with the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive mode, their level of detail is taken to the next level:
NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) gives accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting to any neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard and TV.
Ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections now bounce multiple times compared to the single bounce of the previous solution. The result is even more accurate, realistic, and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections.
Ray-traced reflections are now rendered in full resolution, further improving their quality. And improved, physics-based lighting eliminates the need for other occlusion techniques.
This is achieved through the new RT cores, Tensor cores and advancements of DLSS 3. But also something NVIDIA calls Shader Execution Reordering (SER), which massively boosts the GPU workflow. Here’s the thin one.
The GPU architecture is highly parallelized and is most efficient when running similar workloads concurrently. However, advanced ray tracing requires calculating the effects of millions of rays hitting numerous different material types in a scene, creating a series of divergent, inefficient workloads for shaders (shaders calculate the appropriate light, darkness, and color values while rendering a 3D scene and used in every modern game).
Our new Shader Execution Reordering (SER) technology dynamically reorganizes these previously inefficient workloads into much more efficient workloads, improving shader performance by up to 2x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.
Yeah, pretty impressive that this new technology alone can boost framerates by 25%.
Finally, in addition to the Founders Edition reveals, NVIDIA has noted that multiple partner cards will also be available at launch. More information can be found here.
