More Expensive than Ever: NVIDIA Announces RTX 4090 and 4080

More Expensive than Ever: NVIDIA Announces RTX 4090 and 4080

As confirmed by previous reports and speculations, NVIDIA announced its latest RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs at its GTC 2022 keynote. Both GPUs use NVIDIA’s new Ada Lovelace architecture, where they are manufactured using TSMC’s 4N fabrication process and come with third-generation RT cores, DLSS 3.0, and Shader Execution Rendering.

These upgrades to the RTX 4090 and 4080 should bring in 2-3x better ray tracing performance and 2x better power efficiency than its Ampere-based RTX 30 series GPUs. To showcase what DLSS 3.0 and the third-generation RT cores are capable of, NVIDIA ran Cyberpunk 2077 at close to 100FPS with all ray tracing settings set to max.

As much as we’re all excited for DLSS 3.0, the big catch is that only RTX 40 series cards will support it. Those with RTX 30 series cards will not benefit from it, which will surely make gamers angry. NVIDIA, for their part, explained that DLSS 3.0 requires requires fourth-generation Tensor Cores and a new Optical Flow Accelerator, both of which are only present on RTX 40 series cards.

The RTX 4090 comes with 24GB of GDDR6X memory and comes with 16,384 CUDA cores clocked at 2.23Ghz. NVIDIA claims that the RTX 4090 is around 2-4x more powerful than the RTX 3090Ti while consuming roughly the same amount of power.

Moving to the RTX 4080, there will be a 12GB and 16GB version. Only the latter will have a Founders Edition–if you want the 12GB version, you’ll need to source it from NVIDIA’s partners (that no longer includes EVGA). The 16GB RTX 4080 comes with 9,728 CUDA Cores clocked in at 2.51GHz, and NVIDIA claims that it is 2x more powerful than the RTX 3080Ti while consuming 10% less power. The 12GB version, on the other hand, comes with  7,680 CUDA Cores but with a higher 2.61Ghz base clock.

In terms of power requirements, the 12GB RTX 4080 requires a 700w PSU, while its 16GB sibling needs at least a 750w PSU. The power-hunger RTX 4090 demands an 850w PSU, which might require a lot of users to do significant upgrades. Speaking of the PSU, it’s highly advisable to wait for the upcoming ATX 3.0 PSUs, as the Founders Edition cards will use a new PCIe Gen-5 16-pin connector. Those who are yet to upgrade, however, can use an 8-pin adapter that NVIDIA will provide with each GPU purchase.

Should you want your hands on these new GPUs, be prepared to spend a fortune: the 12GB RTX 4080 starts at $899(~Php 52.1k), while its 16GB version costs $1199(~Php 69.5k). Should you want the RTX 4090, you’ll have to shell out $1599(~Php 92.6k) for it–or roughly the cost of most laptops out there.

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