The hardware giant showed its new flagship GPU, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090. The RTX 40 series will use a new microarchitecture called “Ada Lovelace”. The RTX 4090 will arrive at stores on October 12 and is priced at $1,599, meanwhile, RTX 4080 will have two different models —one with 16GB VRAM and another with 12GB— and it will start shipping this November, starting at $1,199 and $899 respectively; keep in mind that these are MSRP for the Founder Edition RTX 40 series, third-party vendor models are almost always priced at a higher range.
Related: EVGA leaves the GPU market amid a dispute with Nvidia
Nvidia’s hardware partners such as Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, and Zotac already announced their models soon to hit the shelves. EVGA, a long-term partner of Nvidia pulled out of the GPU market completely and won’t sell any RTX 40 series GPUs.
Specifications of RTX 4090 and RTX 4080
| RTX 4090 | RTX 4080 (16GB) | RTX 4080 (12GB) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Memory | 24GB GDDR6X/384 bit | 16GB GDDR6X/256 bit | 12GB GDDR6X/192 bit |
| CUDA cores | 16,384 | 9,728 | 7,680 |
| Boost clock (GHz) | 2.52 | 2.51 | 2.61 |
| PCIe Gen | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Card width | 3 slots | 3 slots | – |
| Power/PSU requirement | 450W/850W | 320W/700W | 285W/700W |
| Availability | October 12 | November 2022 | November 2022 |
| MSRP | $1,599 | $1,199 | $899 |
Thanks to the microarchitecture upgrade, new features are introduced to RTX 40 Series. According to Nvidia’s test results —which should always be taken with a grain of salt for obvious reasons— the RTX 4090 outperforms the 3090 Ti drastically. Graphics shared by Nvidia shows nearly doubled performance in Microsoft Flight Simulator and nearly four times better performance in Cyberpunk 2077.
While these numbers are quite impressive, it would be a reach to call RTX 4090 a “gamer GPU”, especially considering how you can build a moderate PC for the price of the GPU alone. Needless to say, how these GPUs will actually perform in the consumer environment is yet to be seen.
