The long-awaited successor to the Nvidia Ampere series of graphics cards has been officially announced, with pricing and release dates for the Lovelace chips now known. Rumors have been pretty accurate, with the releases of the RTX 4090 and 4080 being in October and November, respectively. And the official pricing is more expensive than we predicted as well.
The next generation was codenamed ‘Lovelace’ after British mathematician Ada Lovelace (who is considered to be the first computer programmer), but they’re better known as the GeForce RTX 40 series.
With the Nvidia hack earlier this year, we had more leaks and rumors than we anticipated, so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Nvidia’s Ada architecture, and when to expect it.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 Lovelace: Cut to the chase
- What is it? Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture
- When will it be available? The RTX 4090 drops on October 12, 2022, and the RTX 4080 drops on November 2022
- What will it cost? The RTX 4090 will be priced at $1,599. The RTX 4080 12GB model is $899, with the 16GB model at $1,199.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 Lovelace: release date
It’s been officially confirmed that the RTX 4090 will be available on October 12, 2022, while both models of the RTX 4080 will be available in November 2022.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 Lovelace: price
We now have officially pricing for the RTX 4090 as well as both 4080 models. The 4090 will have an MSRP of $1,599 (around £1,400 / AU$2,400) for its 24GB GDDR6X.
Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 4080 will have two models, the 12GB version and the 16GB version. The former will have an MSRP of $899 (£849 / AU$1,340), and the latter will be priced at $1,199 (around £1,050 / AU$1,790). It seems that rumors thinking these chips would be even pricier than the previous gen chips were right on the money.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 officially has an MSRP of $699 (£649, about AU$975), while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 officially comes in at just $499 (£469, about AU$680). The flagship of the family at that time before the RTX 3090 Ti was introduced, the RTX 3090, was priced at $1,499 (£1,399, AU$2,100).
The chip shortage, unfortunately, ensured many of these GPUs were artificially inflated so many of us were unable to purchase a card at this price unless you were lucky enough to nab a founders edition directly from Nvidia at launch.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 Lovelace: specifications
So far it’s been confirmed by the Nvidia event that the Lovelace series will use 76 billion transistors, as well as the 5nm production process. It’s also using next-generation Ray Tracing cores, an updated version of a feature that has been present on all RTX branded GPUs from Nvidia.
We also found out that they’ll be using Shader Execution Reordering (SER), which might make native ray tracing possible without DLSS. There’s a four times increase in framerate with DLSS 3 over Native rendering, so DLSS will be even more impressive with DLSS 3.
As previously mentioned, the most prominent speculation floating around on the grapevine is that the Nvidia RTX 4000 GPUs could be twice as fast – and power-hungry – as RTX 3000s, so you might want to look into upgrading your power supply ahead of time to avoid the inevitable shortage when Lovelace is released.
Still, there are tons to parse through, so here’s all the information on what we can expect from the GeForce RTX 4000 series.
Going by the leaked information, there are several models under the 4090 name. Most likely the AD102 will be the flagship model, followed by the AD103 as the next most powerful version. The AD104-106 will probably be the mid-range option, and the AD107 will be for the entry-level market.
It seems that the flagship AD102 GPU model will feature 144 SMs in a single die compared to Ampere’s GA102 84 SMs, making this a jump of 71% and one of the largest in a generation. The AD102 could have as much as 18,432 CUDA cores, a staggering increase of 75% over Nvidia’s forthcoming RTX 3090 Ti which features 10,752 CUDA cores.
Established leaker Kopite7Kimi suggests that this graphics card would use the AD102 chip which will power the RTX 4090. Supposedly the 4080 is set to run with 16GB of GDDR6X VRAM.
RTX 4080 will use AD103 chips, build with 16G GDDR6X, have a similar TGP to GA102. RTX 4070 will use AD104 chips, build with 12G GDDR6, 300W. Both of them haven’t started testing yet, but soon do them.April 27, 2022
What’s also spilled here – and very much the hot topic regarding Lovelace, pun fully intended – is more on the power demands of these RTX 4000 GPUs. We already heard recently from Kopite7kimi that the RTX 4090 could sit at a hefty 600W of power draw (and the aforementioned super heavyweight – maybe RTX Titan – spin on AD102 might just be looking at more like 900W, a truly staggering figure).
With this latest leak, Kopite7kimi claims that the RTX 4070 will sport a TGP or power consumption of 300W. As for the RTX 4080, that’ll supposedly have a “similar TGP to GA102”, the latter of which is the chip that’s the engine of the current RTX 3080 and 3090 models (hence the expectation that AD102 would also serve the RTX 4080, which is apparently not the case).
New photos have emerged that apparently show part of the upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti – and it looks like it’ll be a monster GPU that people with smaller PCs may struggle to install.
The images were posted on the Chiphell forums (opens in new tab), and spotted by Wccftech (opens in new tab), and apparently show the heatsink and cooler of the Founders Edition, which if real would be Nvidia’s own version of the graphics card.
We also seem to get a good look at the heatsink, which is huge. The RTX 4090 Ti, if it exists, would likely be an extremely powerful – and power-hungry – graphics card, and that means it’ll need a hefty cooling solution so it doesn’t overheat.