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Nvidia reveal the GeForce RTX 4080, RTX 4090, and Portal RTXStarting at $899, new GPUs will support faster ray tracing and improved DLSS 3
Starting at $899, new GPUs will support faster ray tracing and improved DLSS 3
As expected, Nvidia have announced the GeForce RTX 4090 during theirGeForce Beyondlivestream – and confirmed the RTX 4080 for good measure. Both GPUs are based on Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace architecture, and will launch this year: the RTX 4090 on October 12th, and the RTX 4080 sometime in November.
Key features of Ada Lovelace, and thus these new cards, include 3rd Gen RT cores, 4th Gen Tensor cores, and a new streaming multiprocessor. These supposedly add up to twice the performance of Ampere (that’s the RTX 30 series architecture currently dominating ourbest graphics cardguide) in standard rasterised games, and up to four times the performance in ray traced games. And since Nvidia were clearly in a ray-tracey mood, they also took the opportunity to revealPortal RTX: a semi-official mod for the originalPortalthat upgrades it with RT lighting and reflection effects. Corrrr.
GeForce RTX 4090 | Beyond FastWatch on YouTube
GeForce RTX 4090 | Beyond Fast
If they can reach the hallowed grounds of a 4x performance boost, it will likely be with ray tracing and, especially,DLSS. Ada Lovelace’s “Shader Execution Reordering” feature reschedules RT workloads on the fly, so the GPU can process ray traced frames more effectively (and, therefore, faster). RTX 40 series GPUs will also be the first to support DLSS 3, a new version of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super-Sampling upscaler. This uses the architecture’s hardware and enhanced AI smarts to generate entire new frames in the upscaling process, not simply regenerating the frames that have already been rendered, leading to a massive boost in FPS.
How massive? Results will vary depending on the game, and even theCyberpunk 2077andMicrosoft Flight Simulatordemos that Nvidia showed during the livestream weren’t terribly helpful due to a lack of specific settings being given. But with maxed-out graphics and ray tracing, these did show Cyberpunk 2077 jumping from about 20-25fps without DLSS to over 60fps with DLSS 3, so it’s clearly got some chops.Nearly 40 gamesare confirmed to be getting DLSS 3 support, already far more than AMD’s latestFSR 2.1upscaler, and these include the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Flight Sim,Hitman 3,Atomic Heart, andThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
It sounds mad, but apparently isthatstraightforward – the games seemingly just need to be based on DX8 or DX9 and use a “fixed function graphics pipeline”, which I’ll admit is getting into techy territory I don’t understand. But Nvidia did show how well it can work with a Remix-ified look atThe Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, whichlooks like a fully fledged remake. Not that I’m advocating AI ever take the place of actual artistry, but I’ll definitely be looking forward to see what folk can do with this.
I’ll also be aiming to get the RTX 4090 and at least one of the RTX 4080 variants into my mitts asap. Unlike with the RTX 30 series, Nvidia has elected to bump the prices up this time – let’s see if they’re really worth it.
