Gaming tech giants Nvidia have revealed their next premium graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090, aimed at gamers looking for the peak of PC visual fidelity. The question is what exactly does it offer?
See the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090’s DLSS 3 in action in Cyberpunk 2077 here
During a media brief, Nvidia revealed some of the key features on offer from the RTX 4090. One such element is DLSS 3, which essentially creates additional, high-quality frames by using the fourth-gen Tensor Cores and Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs.
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This means that Nvidia’s newest graphics cards can take PC visuals to a whole new level on a wide range of games, from Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, to Dying Light 2 and Portal.
Of course, the RTX 4090 also delivers ray tracing, for those extra-slick surfaces and stunningly lifelike pools of water that we’ve come to know so well in recent years. While this is nothing new from Nvidia, it’s worth noting that the RTX 40 series’ Ada Lovelace architecture is able to produce incredible realism thanks to its improvements, tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology, which result in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency from the previous generation.
The new wave of graphics cards come with streaming multiprocessors offering up to 83 teraflops of shader power, which is over double the previous generation. As well, they also feature third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops, a 2.8-times increase from the previous generation. Then there are the fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops, clocking in at 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.
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Another key feature is the Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance, which allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, therefore boosting framerates.
While it’s easy to get bogged down in the technical aspects of these new graphics cards, the two main things to focus on are performance and price relative to Nvidia’s RTX 30 series. According to the figures, the RTX 4090 easily outperforms its predecessor, thanks to its ability to process more data at once.
In short, it’s clear from the data we’ve been given that Nvidia’s newest graphics cards go further than the RTX 30 series. Although the RTX 4090 will cost you hundreds more than the previous premium model, the data above shows what’s on offer, but we have to point out that we haven’t tested the new unit yet.
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The new Ada Lovelace architecture and DLSS 3 technology are available only through the GeForce RTX 40 series, and the improvements they’re set to offer for certain games sound incredible. However, the price gap is not a small one, with the 4080 starting at £949, and the 4090 costing £1,679, so bear that in mind.