As expected, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 4090 during their GeForce Beyond live stream – and confirmed the RTX 4080 for good measure. Both GPUs are based on Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace architecture and will be released this year: the RTX 4090 on October 12, and the RTX 4080 sometime in November.
Key features of Ada Lovelace and thus these new cards include 3rd generation RT cores, 4th generation Tensor cores and a new streaming multiprocessor. They are said to add up to twice the performance of Ampere (that’s the RTX 30 series architecture that currently dominates our best graphics card guide) in standard rasterized games and up to four times the performance in ray tracing games. And since Nvidia were clearly in a ray-tracing mood, they also took the opportunity to reveal Portal RTX: a semi-official mod for the original Portal that upgrades it with RT lighting and reflection effects. Corrrrr.
First, though, those GPUs. The RTX 4090 features 24GB of GDDR6X RAM and will cost $1,599; that puts it just a few hundred dollars below the RTX 3090 Ti, though Nvidia says it outperforms the top-tier Ampere GPU by up to four times. Meanwhile, there will be two versions of the RTX 4080: a 12GB GDDR6X model starting at $899 and a 16GB model starting at $1,199. Both are significantly more expensive than the RTX 3080, which starts at $699, although at least the 16GB model is designed to be up to four times faster than the RTX 3080 Ti. I have requested UK prices and will update this article if I receive them.
If they can hit the holy grail of a 4x performance boost, it will likely be with ray tracing and especially DLSS. Ada Lovelace’s “Reorder Shader Execution” feature reschedules RT workloads on the fly so that the GPU can process raytraced frames more efficiently (and therefore faster). The RTX 40 series GPUs will also be the first to support DLSS 3, a new version of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super-Sampling upscaler. This uses the architecture’s hardware and enhanced AI intelligence to generate entirely new frames in the scaling process, rather than simply regenerating the frames that have already been rendered, resulting in a huge FPS increase.
How massive? Results will vary depending on the game, and even the demos of Cyberpunk 2077 and Microsoft Flight Simulator that Nvidia showed during the live stream weren’t very helpful due to the lack of specific settings. But with upscaled graphics and ray tracing, they showed Cyberpunk 2077 jumping from around 20-25 fps without DLSS to over 60 fps with DLSS 3, so obviously there are some gaps. Nearly 40 games have been confirmed to get DLSS 3 support, already far more than AMD’s latest FSR 2.1 upscaler, and they include the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Flight Sim, Hitman 3, Atomic Heart and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Another DLSS 3 “game” will be Portal RTX, which is coming to Steam later this year as a free download for Portal owners. I’ll leave opinions on how ray tracing affects Portal’s aesthetics between you and your eyes, but it looks incredible from a purely technical standpoint. And in what could be an even more exciting release, the tool used to make it – Nvidia Remix – will also be released for free. Remix aims to help modders easily create ray tracing mods, including DLSS 3 and Nvidia Reflex support, by allowing them to import a game into the tool and simply add these features with a few clicks. It even uses AI to create brand new models and assets that replace the original ones with lower accuracy in the game.
It sounds crazy, but apparently it’s that simple – games seem to just have to be based on DX8 or DX9 and use a “fixed function graphics pipeline”, which I admit is getting into technological territory I don’t understand. But Nvidia showed just how well it can work with a remixed take on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that looks like a complete remake. Not that I’m advocating AI take the place of real art, but I’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing what people can do with it.
I’ll also be looking to get the RTX 4090 and at least one of the RTX 4080 variants into my mitts as soon as possible. Unlike the RTX 30 series, Nvidia chose to increase the prices this time around – let’s see if they’re really worth it.
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