As the clock ticks down to the release of Nvidia’s RTX 40 series graphics cards, PC gamers are anxious to get more details about the company’s next-gen GPUs, which will debut in September or October this year according to rumors.
As is usual for the Santa Clara company, Nvidia apparently plans to launch the GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 first, followed by other models such as the GeForce RTX 4060 at a later date. The RTX 4090 could be released in September or October this year. It will be followed by the RTX 4080 in October or November, and the RTX 4070 in November or December. The RTX 4060 is expected in January 2023.
And the high-end GeForce RTX 4090 could be an absolute beast of a card, with previous rumors and leaks suggesting it could double the performance of Nvidia’s current flagship card, the GeForce RTX 3090.
Also, it seems the card will achieve some pretty impressive clock speeds, this according to notorious leaker and Twitter user kopite7kimi (via videocardz.com).
Apparently, the card’s base clock will be 2235 MHz, which represents an increase of 60 % relative to the base clock of the RTX 3090, which is 1395 MHz. Meanwhile, the boost clock will be 2520 MHz, 40 % higher than that of the RTX 3090 (1695 MHz). The card will be able to achieve a clock speed of 2750 MHz (the actual maximum) according to this latest leak, which is certainly impressive when compared to current-gen Nvidia cards.
The increase in clock speed should give the upcoming RTX 4090 a serious advantage in performance relative to its current-gen sibling. Also taking into account that the card will have 16384 CUDA cores (individual processors which take care of graphics-related tasks) vs the 10496 the RTX 3090 is equipped with, means the RTX 4090 doubling the performance of the RTX 3090 is definitely a possibility. Actually, the card could be able to deliver 90 teraflops of computing power (in single precision workloads) according to VideoCardz.
The GeForce RTX 4090 could be a serious piece of hardware, then, but those looking forward to either the RTX 4080 or the RTX 4070 also now know the latest rumored specifications of those cards thanks to this latest leak (these specs were actually shared earlier and have been reiterated by leaker kopite7kimi in his latest tweet).
It may be slightly disappointing for some people, though, that the RTX 4070 will only ship with 10 GB of memory (as much as the GeForce RTX 3080 has), while the RTX 4080 will come with 16 GB, and the RTX 4090 with 24 GB according to leaks. The RTX 4070’s memory will be of the slower GDDR6 variety, while the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 will sport the faster GDDR6X type.
Also, the RTX 4070 will only have a 160-bit memory bus, vs the 256-bit bus of the RTX 4080 and 384-bit bus of the RTX 4090, meaning its memory bandwidth will be significantly less than that of the other two cards.
It may seem puzzling too for Nvidia to use a 160-bit bus for this card, while the current-gen RTX 3070 has a 256-bit memory bus – but the thing is that the RTX 40 series will have a new hardware architecture and will be made with a new manufacturing process, so direct comparisons of this sort are not possible. Actually, the RTX 4070 is expected to seriously outperform current-gen cards according to rumors.
What’s clear, though, is that the launch of Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards will be one of the most exciting events of the year, something to look forward no doubt for PC Gamers looking to upgrade their rigs with the latest hardware. So it would be a great thing if Nvidia is able to deliver a worthy successor to its RTX 30 series of graphics cards this fall, then.
GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)