Nvidia announces RTX 4090 and 4080 graphics cards, DLSS 3 Eurogamer.net If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. Nvidia announces RTX 4090 and 4080 graphics cards, DLSS 3 Ada Lovelace GPUs are 2x faster than Ampere - and that's not even their best feature. News by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry Published on 20 Sep 2022 64 comments Nvidia has announced its latest generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards at its GTC AI conference. The Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are the first GPUs from the 'Ada Lovelace' series, and they should be up to twice as fast as their last-gen counterparts in rasterised games - and up to four times as fast in ray-traced games. The RTX 4090 24GB will be available on October 12th and costs $1599/£1679, while the RTX 4080 16GB arrives in November and costs $1199/£1269. There's also an RTX 4080 12GB model that costs $899/£949. The 4090 and 4080 are reportedly two to four times faster than their Ampere equivalents, which are the 3090 Ti and the 3080 Ti, respectively. Watch on YouTube The RTX 4090 has already arrived at Digital Foundry HQ, and we've been putting it through its paces... RTX 4090 24GB RTX 4080 16GB RTX 4080 12GB GPU AD102 AD103 AD104 Transistors 76B ? ? Die size 611mm² 380mm² 380mm² CUDA cores 16384 9728 7680 Boost clock 2.52GHz 2.51GHz 2.61GHz Memory interface 384-bit 256-bit 192-bit Memory bandwidth 1018GB/s 742GB/s 557GB/s Power usage 450W 320W 285W PSU requirement 850W 750W 700W PSU cables 3x 8-pin 3x 8-pin 2x 8-pin Price $1499/£1649 $1199/£1269 $899/£949 Release date October 12th, 2022 November, 2022 November, 2022 Note that Nvidia RTX 30-series cards will remain on sale for the moment, filling in the bottom part of the market until lower-tier RTX 40-series GPUs arrive. Nvidia's RTX 4090 and 4080 graphics cards, shown in their Founders Edition guises. So how are these GPUs so fast? Well, the 40-series GPUs use TSMC's '4N' process and boast up to 76 billion transistors and up to 18,000 CUDA cores, 70 percent more than were in last-gen Ampere. The new process allows the generation to be significantly more power-efficient too, although we expect the flagship cards to be as power-hungry as rumoured - you're just getting a ton of extra performance to offset that in efficiency terms. The new streaming multiprocessor uses a new technique, shader execution re-ordering (SER), which Nvidia claims provides a 'two to three times speed-up' for ray tracing and a 25 percent improvement for rasterised games. SER works by dynamically rescheduling shading workloads to better use GPU resources. There are similar advancements in the dedicated ray tracing silicon, with a doubling of ray-triangle intersection throughput, a new opacity micromap engine that doubles the speed of 'ray tracing of alpha test geometry' and a micromesh engine that 'increases geometric richness without the BVH build and storage cost'. There's also a new and more powerful Tensor core for AI tasks. Some more shots from Nvidia's GTC stream. It is also the first card to support Nvidia's DLSS 3, a new technique that generates entirely new frames - essentially adding in interpolated frames between 'real' ones to dramatically increase frame-rates. This has a deleterious effect on input latency, so it's combined with Reflex to reduce input latency as much as possible. This reduces the load on both the CPU and the GPU, so you actually see frame-rate benefits in both CPU and GPU-limited games - although the input latency penalty means it'll be less useful for, say, competitive FPS games. Nvidia demonstrated Cyberpunk 2077 running at ~22fps at 4K with RT enabled and DLSS disabled, then ~100fps with RT enabled and DLSS 3 engaged - a massive speedup even if this is a cherry-picked demo. The firm also played a video demo of Flight Sim 2020, with the game running at ~60fps with RT + DLSS disabled and ~135fps with RT + DLSS 3 enabled - good evidence that the DLSS 3 technique does ease CPU limitations. Portal vs Portal RTX. As well as upgrading existing games with RTX and DLSS 3, Nvidia also announced a 'new' title: Portal RTX. This remaster, 15 years on from the original release, looks impressive from the short teaser trailer. It'll be released for free for Portal owners in November. The mod was created in what Nvidia is calling 'RTX Remaster', an application that lets you produce mods for a wide range of games that add ray tracing and AI-upscaled textures - very neat. Watch on YouTube Portal with RTX. Elsewhere, Nvidia announced Racer RTX, a 'simulated world' with incredible realism - think their marble demo turned up to 11. Watch on YouTube Nvidia Racer RTX. It was an impressive presentation from Nvidia, and we're looking forward to testing both the performance and features of the new generation. It'll be fascinating to see whether DLSS 3 lives up to Team Green's lofty promises... and whether these new cards will actually be available at their announced prices if the performance claims are substantiated. We'll share more information when we have it! Here's the full Nvidia RTX 40-series reveal in video form. Will you support the Digital Foundry team? Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did. Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we've chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn't free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50. We think it's a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you. Support Digital Foundry Find out more about the benefits of our Patreon More News Atari will hold RollerCoaster Tycoon rights for another decade Ups and downs. 7 Lady Dimitrescu will be a tad smaller in Resident Evil Village's Mercenaries DLC Level the playing field. 1 Overwatch 2 suffers another DDoS attack and character roster bugs Mei Mei. 7 Nintendo Switch firmware update lets you take screenshots in the Switch Online app The app on your console, not your phone. 7 Latest Articles Genshin Impact Path of Gleaming Jade dates, login event rewards Including other anniversary rewards and how to claim them. Atari will hold RollerCoaster Tycoon rights for another decade Ups and downs. 7 Jelly Deals Logitech's G Pro X gaming headset is its lowest-ever price during Amazon's Early Access sale Prime Members can get it for just £52. Jelly Deals Save over £500 off the retail price on this beefy ASUS TUF Dash gaming laptop from Amazon Under £1080 for an RTX 3070 laptop. Supporters Only Premium only Off Topic: Take a minute to appreciate Cookin' with Coolio's incredible scallops recipe. What a great book. Premium only Off Topic: Reading City of Glass in comic form "Where exactly am I going?" Premium only Off Topic: Il Buco is a transporting film about a really big hole Underlands. Off-Topic Netflix handled Sandman brilliantly It was Dreamy. 9 Buy things with globes on them And other lovely Eurogamer merch in our official store! Explore our store