NVIDIA’s latest and greatest is finally here. and it’s pretty great.
Since you’re thirsty for details, we’ll skip to the punchline: the GeForce RTX 4090 has over 18,000 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X memory, and NVIDIA says it’s twice as fast as the RTX 3090 Ti in raster graphics while being four times faster in ray-tracing. It’s coming on October 12th, and it’s going to cost $1,599—well below many predictions for the price.
NVIDIA says that the likely-more-relevant GeForce RTX 4080 is two-to-four times faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, and that card comes in two variants: a model with 16GB of GDDR6X memory starting at $1,199, and a model with 12GB starting at $899. Unfortunately, these cards won’t be available until November.
Interestingly, as part of this graph demonstrating NVIDIA’s gain over the last generation, the company very briefly spoke on power efficiency. Lovelace is indeed more power-efficient than Ampere thanks to its insane performance, but it’s difficult to not notice that the Ada bullet point goes all the way to 450 watts on the right-hand chart. Jensen didn’t shy away from this, noting that « you can really push Ada, » and saying that the company has overclocked it « past 3 GHz » in its labs.
NVIDIA didn’t offer a lot of details on the hardware configuration of the new GPUs, but did note that Ada « evolves all three RTX processors, » meaning the CUDA cores, RT cores, and tensor cores.
