You may have seen in our blog earlier in the year our review of graphics card currently available and which one is best value for money. Now, Nvidia has released its brand new 4000 series. We wrote about them in the run to up release, and now they’re finally here, we’re able to really break it down and get into the nitty gritty of the 4000 series.
The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are real, but only the 4090 is currently available for purchase: both versions of the 4080 will be released later this year, and the rumours indicate we may see it sometime around Halloween, but Nvidia is keeping mum about any release dates for their entry and mid-level graphics cards.
The most controversial news about Nvidia’s brand new items has undoubtedly been the price. It was so controversial, in fact, that Intel pushed back with their own affordable Arc A770 as prices for the 4090 are reported to start close to $899 USD and £949 GBP for the 12GB version, and the 16GB model at $1,199 USD / £1,269 GBP. A stark contrast to the RTX 3080 which debuted at $699 for 10GB and $1,249 for 12GB by comparison, the latter quickly usurped by the 3080 Ti at $1,199, which we awarded as the best GPU on the current market.
Running on the new Ada Lovelace architecture rather than their Ampere system, it will improve the RTX Processors and neural rendering engines. It will also support the new and improved DLSS 3.0 upscaling, which doesn’t work on older RTX GPUs.
Nvidia are being smart and releasing two versions of their flagship GPU to offer two options to consumers. 12GB is definitely a good baseline as most modern games would struggle with anything below that played at a high resolution and settings.
According to Nvidia, they boast that the RTX 4080 will be two and four times the speed of an RTX 3080 Ti, but this of course will depend on the model you buy. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has assured customers and investors during the Nvidia keynote of 2022 that the new 4000 series aren’t designed as replacements for the RTX series, but rather a complimentary enthusiast range that supplements it.
CEO Jensen Huang with the new RTX 4090.
Benchmark speculation
According to some leakers, there are claims that the RTX 4090 could double the performance of its predecessor, the 3090 in both standard rasterization and ray tracing and even may break the 100 terraflops ceiling, meaning it could potentially surpass the capabilities of the RTX 3090 Ti. Some figure even suggest that the gap between Lovelace and Ampere technology could be as much as 60% faster than Nividia’s previous architecture. We’re anxious to get our hands on the 4090 to see if these claims are true and really put it through its paces. Until then, official third-party benchmarks will be released on October 12th.
