You didn't want that spare arm or leg anyway, right?
Nvidia RTX 4090

Nvidia announced their new desktop GPUs today and they are none other than the expected and anticipated RTX 40-series of cards. These are the successor to the now two-year-old RTX 30-series of cards. With the new generation comes new advancements such as DLSS 3. All of the newness comes at a very hefty price though.

The Nvidia RTX 40-series runs on the company's new Ada Lovelace architecture. The first card is none other than the RTX 4090. This card includes 24GB of GDDR6X memory and is allegedly anywhere between two to four times after than the RTX 3090 Ti. The RTX 4090 will set you back at least $1,599 (USD) when it releases on October 12. The 4090 includes 16,384 CUDA cores and are capable of 1,321 Tensor-TFLOPs, 191 RT-TFLOPs, and 83 Shader-TFLOPs (for whatever that information is worth to you).

Nvidia also announced two RTX 4080 configurations: A 12GB model and a 16GB model. Nvidia says that the RTX 4080 is two to four times more powerful than the RTX 3080 Ti. A release date for either of the 4080 cards was not given outside of a unfirm "November" window. The 12GB model will retail for $899 and the 16GB model will go for an eye watering $1,199.

Other differences between the 16GB and 12GB models are reportedly numerous. The 12GB model includes fewer CUDA cores, a higher boost clock, a lower memory bus (256-bit vs 192-bit), lower bandwidth, and lower total graphics power (TGP) (340W vs 285W). In most reasonable GPU launches, the 12GB 4080 card would be called the RTX 4070, but we are long past the point of reasonable right now from Nvidia.

These Ada Lovelace-based cards features Nvidia third-generation RTX technologies. Included in the new RTX features is support for real-time path tracing in addition to the third generation of Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), or DLSS 3 for short. Nvidia claims that DLSS 3 is able to double game performance, though this seems to be in comparison to not using DLSS at all as opposed to comparing it against DLSS 2.

It is very important to note here that the prices mentioned prior are only for the first-party cards (typically referred to as "Founders Edition") sold by Nvidia. If you were to purchase a card from any of Nvidia's third-party partners (now sans EVGA), those already astronomical prices are going to be much higher. Regional pricing in countries that aren't the United States are also expected to be quite a bit more outrageous.

Several third-party partners have also already announced their 4090 and 4080 lineup, albeit without any prices specified yet. The trend seems to be that these third-party cards will occupy at least 3.5-slots on both the RTX 4090 and 16GB RTX 4080 cards. The 12GB 4080 cards also seem to be hitting the 3-slot mark as well.

These high prices are certainly a very interesting decision by Nvidia given how much of a slump the GPU market is in right now. Prices on the 30-series have plummeted due to a general crash in the crypto markets. There is also the recent switch to proof of stake for Ethereum, which has essentially eliminated the need for GPU mining. Nvidia's revenues dropped nearly $1 billion in its latest earnings report due to these factors.

Nvidia are out of their damn minds with these prices for the 40-series. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang must still be of the mindset that this is a scalpers and miners market, when that has very much not been the case for several months now.