Technology company Nvidia wowed the world in late 2020 when it launched its RTX 30 series graphics cards. The likes of the GeForce RTX 3080 offered performance not yet seen from a consumer graphics card, letting PC games run the latest video games (such as Cyberpunk 2077) at 4K resolution with ray tracing and all the bells and whistles turned on.
Also the GeForce RTX 3090 remains the fastest graphics card to date, even if Nvidia is now gearing up to launch the RTX 3090 Ti, which should offer up to 10 % more performance according to reports.
More interesting for those holding out on getting a new graphics card is the fact that Nvidia will be releasing its RTX 40 series graphics cards this September according to rumors, and these will offer hitherto unseen performance from a graphics card when they arrive this fall.
More specifically, the upcoming GeForce RTX 4090 could be up to twice as fast as the RTX 3090, making it a monster for gaming.
As was recently reported on PCGamesN, sources close to Moore’s Law is Dead say gamers should expect at least twice the ray tracing performance, and also a frame rate increase of more than 100 % in games that don’t use ray tracing from Nvidia’s new flagship card.
This will come at a cost though, and if the RTX 3090 has a MSRP of $1,500 US dollars, we can expect the upcoming RTX 4090 to be in the same ballpark. There’s also the matter that this will apparently be a power-hungry card – it might draw between 450 W to 600 W of power, meaning those planning to take the jump and buy an RTX 4090 might have to upgrade their power supply too…
The card will also have an upgraded memory controller to support the latest GDDR7 memory, as will all the other RTX 40 series cards.
An earlier leak, which resulted from a data breach which occurred this February had revealed more information about Nvidia’s upcoming new-gen architecture (codenamed “Lovelace”), including the fact that the cards will have more CUDA cores (computing units which take care of graphics tasks) and more cache too.
Actually, the flagship RTX 40 series GPU will pack 18,432 CUDA cores, 70 % more than those found in the RTX 3090 according to the leak. The top-end card could boast up to 96 MB of cache as well, something that could make the RTX 4090 a speed demon for games.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 (to give it its full name) will likely release this September as stated earlier, together with the GeForce RTX 4080 and the GeForce RTX 4070, while other models like the RTX 4060 are expected to debut later.
Nvidia will have to deal with the competition of course – Intel’s Arc Alchemist cards will be hitting the market in a couple of months. Meanwhile, AMD’s new batch of graphics cards (based on their RDNA 3 architecture) are also on the horizon.
It’s clear, then, that things are about to get very interesting in the graphics card arena, and even though it’s been pretty hard to get hold of a video card in recent times (the pandemic and Bitcoin miners being the chief culprits) things will surely get better in the months to come.
GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)