Nvidia officially unveiled its 40 series Ada Lovelace cards, with three variations on display today. The new flagship of the series, the RTX 4090, is being touted as having 4x the performance of the 3090 Ti.
The three cards shown off today are two variants of the upcoming RTX 4080, a 12GB and a 16GB version, as well as the RTX 4090. In terms of how they look, they are similar in their design as the 30 series reference cards, but under the hood houses some powerhouse hardware: third-generation RT cores, fourth-generation Tensor cores, dual NVENC encoders, coupled with a TSMC 4NM process.
The next generation of DLSS, Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling technique, was also announced today. DLSS 3 is said to have frame generation, which sees Nvidia's hardware use AI to generate new frames, integrating Nvidia's Reflex tech to create a responsive image. This is thanks to the new fourth-generation Tensor cores found on the 40 series hardware, as well as the Optical Flow Accelerator introduced with the cards.
As such, Nvidia is claiming up to 4x performance when using DLSS 3 in supported games when ray tracing. The company released an example video with Cyberpunk 2077, arguably the most advanced implementation of ray tracing on the market to date. The video shows the game running at around 20 fps with RTX on and DLSS off, while DLSS 3 boosts that to over 100 fps. Take these figures with a grain of salt as always with internal benchmarks, but it's still impressive if it pans out in real world testing.
The Nvidia 40 series launches on October 12th with the RTX 4090 at $1599. Two variants of the 4080 were announced today as well, with the 12GB 4080 running $899 whilst the 16GB version sits at $1199. These two cards will be out sometime in November.
