Nvidia's Lovelace letdown

TRADE CHAT | IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE this way. 2022 had all the makings of a stellar year for PC graphics, so good it would make up for the pandemic- and crypto-fueled bubble. Alas, Nvidia has kicked off the latest round of GPU launches with the RTX 40 Series, otherwise known as Lovelace. And it’s a crushing disappointment. It’s also worrying for AMD’s upcoming GPUs.

- Jeremy Laird

The new RTX 4090 is a beast, pity about the rest of the new Lovelace range.

Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 board is a beaut. So is the AD102 GPU at its heart. Nvidia has not lost its technical touch, the 4090 is a major leap forward. The problem lies with the pair of so-called RTX 4080 boards. They are, in my opinion, trash. To understand why, let’s go back to the launch of the Ampere RTX 30 Series two years ago. Then, Nvidia rolled out the impressive RTX 3080. It was a cutdown version of the RTX 3090 and used the same high-end GA102 chip with a few circuits fused off. The 3080 had roughly 80 percent of the functional units of the RTX 3090 for a fraction of the cost.