NVIDIA has unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 series of graphics cards today, with the company’s new flagship, the RTX 4090 GPU, leading the charge.

According to NVIDIA, the RTX 40 Series cards are the first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, and introduces “massive” generational leaps in both performance and efficiency. The RTX 40 cards also features real-time ray tracing and neural rendering, too.

The RTX 40 Series GPUs feature a range of new technological innovations, including:

• Streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 teraflops of shader power — 2x over the previous generation.
• Third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops — 2.8x over the previous generation.
• Fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops — 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.
• Shader Execution Reordering (SER) that improves execution efficiency by rescheduling shading workloads on the fly to better utilize the GPU’s resources. As significant an innovation as out-of-order execution was for CPUs, SER improves ray-tracing performance up to 3x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.
• Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, enabling the neural network to boost frame rates while maintaining image quality.
• Architectural improvements tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology results in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency.
• Dual NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC) cut export times by up to half and feature AV1 support. The NVENC AV1 encode is being adopted by OBS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Discord and more.

NVIDIA mentions how the company’s new ray-tracing tech for the new third-generation RT Cores have been enhanced to “faster ray-triangle intersection testing and include two important new hardware units. An Opacity Micromap Engine speeds up ray tracing of alpha-test geometry by a factor of 2x, and a Micro-Mesh Engine generates micro-meshes on the fly to generate additional geometry. The Micro-Mesh Engine provides the benefits of increased geometric complexity without the traditional performance and storage costs of complex geometries.”

Another thing revealed today was NVIDIA’s DLSS 3, which is the next evolution of the chipmaker’s Deep Learning Super Sampling neural-graphics technology for games and other creative apps. This AI-powered tech can generate entire frames for massively faster gameplay, and can even overcome CPU performance limitations in games by allowing the GPU to generate entire frames independent. 

GeForce RTX 4090:

24GB G6X

2-4x faster than 3090 Ti

Price: $1,599

Release Date: October 12

Press release info:

The RTX 4090 is the world’s fastest gaming GPU with astonishing power, acoustics and temperature characteristics. In full ray-traced games, the RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 is up to 4x faster compared to last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2. It is also up to 2x faster in today’s games while maintaining the same 450W power consumption. It features 76 billion transistors, 16,384 CUDA^® cores and 24GB of high-speed Micron GDDR6X memory, and consistently delivers over 100 frames per second at 4K-resolution gaming. 

GeForce RTX 4080:

2-4x faster than 3080 Ti

16GB G6X, 12GB G6X

Price: Starting at $1,199 and $899

Release Date: November 2022

The company also announced the RTX 4080, launching in two configurations. The RTX 4080 16GB has 9,728 CUDA cores and 16GB of high-speed Micron GDDR6X memory, and with DLSS 3 is 2x as fast in today’s games as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and more powerful than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at lower power. The RTX 4080 12GB has 7,680 CUDA cores and 12GB of Micron GDDR6X memory, and with DLSS 3 is faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, the previous-generation flagship GPU.

You can check out a lot more technical info on the RTX 4000 series right here.