Nvidia's Hot New Card

Both metaphorically and literally

Nvidia’s new baby is a beast of a GPU, with up to 76 billion transistors, up from Ampere’s maximum of 28 billion.

NVIDIA’S NEW GPU has landed in the form of three new 4000-series graphics cards, and they are beasts. The $1,599 RTX 4090 24GB is a triple-slot 450W monster with 16,384 CUDA cores—50 percent more than the RTX 3090. Next is the $1,199 RTX 4080 16GB with 9,728 CUDA cores, and finally, the RTX 4080 12GB at $899 with 7,680 cores. All three use different versions of the new Ada Lovelace GPU coupled to GDDR6X memory. These have fourth-generation Tensor cores, third-generation ray tracing cores, shader execution reordering, DLSS 3, and clocks over 2.5GHz. These updated technologies, along with bigger core counts and faster clocks, add up to a big performance increase over the Ampere-powered cards. Every metric has been bumped: doubled or more in many cases. Nvidia’s claims include the new cards running games between two and four times as fast as their predecessors. Anything with ray tracing is particularly blessed.