Though RTX 40 could be fast, Nvidia’s new GPUs are yet another round of price increases for GPUs, one that makes building a PC more expensive than ever before.
Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is on the way. The company revealed as much today during its GeForce Beyond event at GTC 2022. It promises two to four times the performance of the RTX 3090 Ti, which would make it one of the largest jumps we’ve seen in performance between generations.
If you ignore the price, that is. With the RTX 4090 launching at $1,599, the RTX 4080 16GB at $1199, and the RTX 4080 12GB at $899, Nvidia’s new GPUs represent yet another round of price increases for new GPUs, one that makes building a PC more expensive than ever before.
It used to be the case that newer GPUs had much better bang for the uck than older ones, at least if you’re just comparing MSRP. You could usually expect 30% or more performance per dollar with each new generation, and some generations delivered as much as 50% or even 70% more value than the previous one. For example, the GTX 1080 Ti was about 70% faster than the GTX 980 Ti and it only cost about $50 more; the 1080 Ti’s great value is one of the reasons why it’s such a legendary Nvidia GPU. However, it’s been apparent for a while that Nvidia just isn’t offering the generational value improvements it used to. We saw it in the RTX 20 series, and we also saw it in the RTX 30 series, which was only a partial improvement over its predecessor.
The RTX 40 series is no different. Even if we take Nvidia’s own numbers at face value (the lower end of the range, anyways), the RTX 4080 16GB at about double the performance of the RTX 3080 isn’t all that great when it’s nearly double the price, too. In fact, the 4080 16GB would need to be 2.3 times faster than the 3080 to have even 30% more bang for buck. Sure, the 40 series has better ray tracing performance and more Tensor cores than the 30 series, but we’re still not to the point where that kind of technology is truly standard.
There are also other reasons to care about the price, even if the value is good.
