Undeterred by a world pandemic that’s been dominated by provide chain mishaps, scalpers, and the return of crypto, Nvidia continues releasing a complete new graphics card line. Speaking on the firm’s GeForce Beyond occasion at the moment, CEO Jensen Huang launched us to the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, the opening salvo in a brand new line of GPUs that Team Green hopes can escape the destiny of the stalled RTX 3000 sequence. To assist that dream, the corporate additionally introduced DLSS 3.0 upgraded tech that provides extra frames with much less work, plus SER, a brand new RTX graphics engine that guarantees to drastically enhance ray tracing efficiency. RTX Remix can be coming to democratize the remastering of older video games.

It’s exhausting to say whether or not Nvidia’s RTX 3000 sequence of GPUs was successful. The playing cards themselves had been nice, however Nvidia simply couldn’t push out sufficient provide to satisfy demand. As a lot as consistently promoting out in your hottest shopper product seems like successful, it implies that the RTX 3000 line solely ever existed in idea for many.

Now that world leaders are declaring the pandemic to be over and crypto is going through ‘The Merge,’ there’s motive for wishful thinkers to start out planning their subsequent improve. Which is nice, as a result of the RTX 4090 seems like a major enchancment over the RTX 3090, and particularly over any GTX 1000 or RTX 2000 sequence GPUs you would possibly nonetheless be rocking.

Released at a launch worth of $1,499 (that it nonetheless typically sells effectively above as a result of lack of provide), the RTX 3090 rocks over 10,000 CUDA cores, 24 GB of VRAM with a bandwidth of 19.5 Gbps, and eats 350W+ of energy. For context, that lets it hit over 70 frames per second in staple take a look at video games like Metro Exodus at 4K and with ray tracing on, at the very least when supported by the correct system.

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What are the RTX 4090 specs?

At $1,599, the RTX 4090 promises to be an aggressive upgrade to the RTX 3090 without leaning on a similarly aggressive price hike. While Huang didn’t go into details on its specs (although leakers have), he did demo Microsoft Flight Simulator, Portal, and Cyberpunk 2077 running on the 4090. With blanket promises that the card is 2-4 times faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, which is an upgraded version of the 3090, Huang showed 4K framerates above 100 fps on both Cyberpunk 2077 and Microsoft Flight Sim, both with ray-tracing on.

We don’t know what kind of CPU or other specs the test machines for these demos had, but this kind of performance, should it pan out in real world testing, comes close to making the choice between fps and fidelity a thing of the past. According to Huang, that’s thanks to DLSS 3.0, an upgrade to Nvidia’s AI graphics engine that predicts pixels to allow your machine to pump out more frames without having to manually compute each one.

DLSS 3.0 supposedly predicts entire frames, rather than pixels, leading to a 25% increase in game performance overall and a 2-3 times bump in ray tracing performance when compared to DLSS 2.0. While this aids non ray-traced game performance as well, the RTX 4000 series will also see the introduction of Shader Execution Reordering, or SER, which more efficiently calculates ray-tracing.

Taken together with the RTX 4090’s hardware, Nvidia promises its new card will be 2x faster at non ray-tracing tasks and 4 time faster at ray-tracing ones. That’s a lot of power for new games to work with, but Nvidia’s also pushing out more support for older games with the RTX 4000 series, including Portal RTX, a new mod that Nvidia made, which is coming free to Portal owners later this year.

RTX Remix is a new tool for AI upscaling game textures and adding RTX support into old games. Huang demonstrated how it works with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game from 2002, and while we don’t know much about what kind of power it will need in addition to an RTX 4000 series GPU, it’s going to be available for modders everywhere.

Big promises mean little if you can’t actually buy an RTX 4000 series card, but if Nvidia has figured out its stock problems, which it didn’t address during the reveal, then the RTX 4090 is looking like it’ll be able to give you far more power for less than an RTX 3090 might have cost a few months ago. Still, Nvidia’s RTX 4080 is also here if $1,599 seems too costly, and Huang said the company will continue to support its RTX 3000 line as well.

The RTX 4080 begins at $899 for a 12GB mannequin and goes as much as $1,199 for a 16GB mannequin. We didn’t hear a lot concerning the GPU other than that, however Nvidia guarantees it’ll ship 2-4 occasions extra efficiency than the RTX 3080 Ti.

RTX 4090 will hit the market on October 12, while RTX 4080’s release date will come in the future. Nvidia certainly made plenty of promises in the reveal, although productivity performance was largely kept to vague promises about Nvidia’s Omniverse tool and corporate AI. The company has also emailed us about new AV1 encoders that promise to improve video rendering speeds and livestream quality, with support for AV1 coming to OBS, Discord, and video editing apps like Adobe Premiere Pro.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for stock and pricing on release, as well as hard specs and how the card performs once it actually gets in gamers’ hands.