NVIDIA announced their next generation of graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 40 Series, in last week’s GeForce Beyond presentation. The first two cards that will be available to consumers will be the RTX 4080, which will come in 12GB and 16GB versions, alongside the high end RTX 4090.
The new RTX 40 Series is powered by NVIDIA’s next-gen Ada Lovelace architecture, which features upgraded ray tracing and AI-based neural graphics. The RTX 4080 will be sold in two versions, one with 12GBs and another with 16GBs of GDDR6X memory. NVIDIA stated the 4080s are 2-4 times faster than last generation’s RTX 3080 Ti. The RTX 4090 comes with 24GBs of GDDR6X memory. NVIDIA claims the RTX 4090 is 2-4 times faster than the RTX 2090 Ti of last generation.
All three of the announced RTX 40 Series cards will support NVIDIA ShadowPlay and will allow gameplay capture up to 8K resolution at 60fps in HDR. For gamers that livestream, NVIDIA is also utilizing its latest encoders with support for AV1 encoding to allow for efficiency for livestreams.
Along with the announcements of the new specs of the new generation of graphics cards came the announcement of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition with an all-new design that on first look, definitely looks like a massive brick. Touting a larger fan and power supply, NVIDIA states these changes will allow for better cooling and better energy consumption for a more stable overall performance.
As for pricing, the Founders Edition RTX 4080 12GB will start at $899 while the 16GB version is set to be priced at $1,199 and will be available in November. The Founders Edition RTX 4090 will start at $1,599 and will arrive on shelves on October 12th. Third party RTX 40 series cards are expected to arrive around the same time as the Founders Edition from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and others, but one name that will be missing this year is EVGA, which stated the other week they have ended all relations with NVIDIA.
NVIDIA competitor AMD announced the reveal of their new RDNA 3 graphics cards for November 3rd. AMD has pushed NVIDIA to the limits in terms of pricing and performance over the last several generations, which many are expecting AMD to do once again this year.
Image from: NVIDIA
