NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series: what is worth knowing about the new graphics cards?

The GeForce RTX 40 series from NVIDIA is finally officially introduced: thanks to the new 4nm Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture and upgraded NVIDIA DLSS 3.0 technology the new graphics cards promise a significant performance increase (2-4 times) over the top models of the RTX 30 series, including RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 4090 Ti.

What should we know about the new line of NVIDIA graphics cards?

NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture

The RTX 40 series is based on NVIDIA's latest architecture codenamed Ada Lovelace - in honor of the woman considered by many to be the world's first programmer. 

The main features of the Ada Lovelace graphics architecture and graphics cards based on it are: 

• Third-generation RT cores provide up to 2 times faster performance in ray tracing operations compared to the previous generation; 
• fourth-generation tensor cores can be up to 2 times faster in AI-learning operations thanks to extended support for the FP8 data format; 
• CUDA cores are up to 2 times faster in single-precision operations compared to the previous generation solutions.

Ada Lovelace is based on NVIDIA's optimized TSMC 4N process technology. It features up to 76 billion transistors (up from 28 billion in the previous generation) and is considered the most advanced GPU architecture ever created.

Most of the performance in games comes from streaming multiprocessors (SM). NVIDIA experts doubled the peak FP32 number of operations in the last generation, and Ada Lovelace more than doubled it, delivering up to 90 teraflops in the shader blocks of NVIDIA GPUs. The GeForce RTX 4090, for example, gets 83 teraflops. By comparison, the fastest graphics processor of the previous generation provided shader unit speeds of 40 teraflops.

Shader Execution Reordering technology

Shader Execution Reordering (SER), a shader execution reordering technology, allows modification of code processing so that the compute units themselves receive data and instructions in the order that is most beneficial in terms of code processing efficiency. SER can increase shader performance by up to 2x, and frame rate in the game by up to 25%.

DLSS 3.0

DLSS (smoothing with deep learning algorithms) is an AI-powered rendering technology that, with specialized tensor cores, improves performance and helps produce beautiful, crisp images.

The Ada Lovelace architecture introduces DLSS 3.0 technology, which adds AI-powered optical multi-frame generation, enabling the generation of high-quality frames, not just pixels, as was the case with DLSS 2.0. The technology processes the current frame and the previous frame to get data, including pixel direction and velocity and the geometry of objects in the scene, feeds it into a neural network, and generates intermediate frames. It sounds rather complicated, but according to experts, we are talking about a huge improvement in gameplay performance.

Unfortunately, the next-generation version of DLSS will only be supported on RTX 40 series graphics cards, while the RTX 30 series will remain with DLSS 2.0.

Characteristics of Nvidia RTX 40 series graphics cards

According to rumors and leaks, the characteristics of video cards from the new series will be as follows: 

	Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 12GB	Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 16GB	Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090
GPU	AD104-400	AD103-300	AD102-300
Streaming Multiprocessors	60	76	128
CUDA Cores	7,680	9,728	16,384
Memory	12GB GDDR6X	16GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X
Memory Speed	21Gbps	23Gbps	21Gbps
TDP	285-366W	340-516W	450-660W
Boost Clock	2610MHz	2505MHz	2520MHz

When to expect the release of the Nvidia RTX 40 series? 

Nvidia has confirmed that the top-end RTX 4090 will be available on October 12, 2022. There is no data on the release of RTX 4080 variants yet, but according to rumors, they may be available in early November.

How much will Nvidia RTX 40 Series graphics cards cost? 

Here is how much the Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs will cost:

• Nvidia RTX 4080 (12GB) - starting at $899
• Nvidia RTX 4080 (16GB) - price to be specified 
• Nvidia RTX 4090 - from $1,599

Thus, the RTX 4080 will go up by $200 compared to the RTX 3080, while the top-end RTX 4090 seems to go up only $100 compared to its counterpart from the previous series.