Nvidia revealed three high-end cards in its new 40-series GeForce graphics cards today (September 20) during the GTC 2022 keynote, announcing the arrival of the next big thing in Nvidia GPUs.
This is significant because the GPU shortage that has plagued the industry since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is finally starting to subside, and with GPU prices plummeting, high-end graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia are starting to rapidly inflate their prices.
This is good news for performance enthusiasts because it means you have a better chance of buying a new GPU for MSRP now than you have in years. But that could be bad news for Nvidia, which is preparing to release some of the most powerful – and more expensive – new Series 40 cards at a time when the GPU market is being flooded with cheaper cards, many of which are being sold passively by miners disappointed by the crypto crash. Recently.
However, Nvidia has unveiled three new cards in its new 40-series GeForce GPUs: the Nvidia GeForce 4090 and two Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 models. One version of the GeForce RTX 4080 comes with 12GB MicronGDDR6X memory, and the other offers 16GB. All of these cards are built on Nvidia’s Lovelace architecture and will begin appearing in the best gaming PCs released later this year.
Here’s what we know about how powerful each of the new models are, and how much they cost.
Nvidia GeForce 4080: Price and Release Date
Two Nvidia GeForce 4080 models were revealed today, and multiple models of both are expected to hit the market in November 2022 from third-party manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, PNY, and more. Nvidia will also be producing a special enterprise edition of the Nvidia GeForce 4080 16GB for those interested.
The 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 card has 7680 CUDA cores and the aforementioned 12GB of Micron GDDR6X memory. Nvidia claims it’s faster than the RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 3, and will go on sale in November for $899.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 16GB is launching at the same time with an even bigger price tag of $1199. So you get 9728 CUDA cores and 16GB of onboard memory. Nvidia claims it’s more powerful than the 3090 Ti at lower power, and with DLSS 3 it can deliver twice as much performance as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
Nvidia GeForce 4090: Price and Release Date
Nvidia also revealed the more powerful GeForce RTX 4090, the new best-of-its-kind card. It’ll go on sale earlier than 4,080, with Nvidia claiming it’ll hit store shelves on Wednesday, October 12 with a starting price of $1,599.
As with the RTX 4080 16GB, Nvidia will sell Founders Edition versions of the 4090 along with configurations sold by third-party vendors like Gigabyte and MSI.
For that $1,599 price tag, you get a massive card with 76 billion transistors, 16,384 CUDA cores and 24GB of Micron GDDR6X memory. Nvidia claims it can deliver up to 4 times more performance (when using DLSS 3) than a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti using DLSS 2, plus it promises to deliver 100 fps consistently when playing in 4K. While Nvidia declined to specify which game(s) were played in 4K to achieve this performance, the base CUDA count alone is enough to impress.
A look at the Nvidia 40 series
The next generation of Nvidia GPUs are here, and that’s good news for anyone interested in high-performance computing. Between the debut of Nvidia 40-series cards and the release of the Intel Arc GPU, PC enthusiasts are likely to get more relief from the exorbitant GPU prices thanks to a new supply of cards hitting the market through the end of 2022.
But as my colleague Tony Polanco noted when explaining why he can’t get excited about Nvidia’s GeForce 40-series cards, one of the big problems with being a head of a GPU today is dealing with speculators who are driving up prices. Hopefully, Nvidia and its manufacturing partners can come up with a market strategy that makes buying and reselling these new GPUs less attractive to speculators.