Luke HendersonSeptember 21, 2022Nvidia, PC, hardware

Nvidia have announced the 40 series of their RTX cards, lead by the GeForce 4090

Luke HendersonSeptember 21, 2022Nvidia, PC, hardware

They did it, they actually did it. Not content with releasing their 30 series of cards, the 3090 and so on, starting in September of 2022, but Nvidia have announced that this October the 40 series will come and will offer roughly 4 times the power compared to the last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti.

The world’s first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA® Ada Lovelace architecture and represents a new era of real-time ray tracing and neural rendering, which uses AI to generate pixels.

“The age of RTX ray tracing and neural rendering is in full steam, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, at the GeForce® Beyond: Special Broadcast at GTC. “Ada provides a quantum leap for gamers and paves the way for creators of fully simulated worlds. With up to 4x the performance of the previous generation, Ada is setting a new standard for the industry.”

What does this mean in terms of games, well check out this video of Cyberpunk 2077 running on the new card, to get an idea.

As you can see, things look a little different and part of that is helped by the DLSS 3 technology. Deep Learning Super Sampling is a technology that generates frames for the in-between, so if a game is made to run at 60fps, DLSS can create extra frames, allowing it to run at 120fps, without the developers doing extra work. The tech is already being worked into some existing games and some game engines, here are a few announced so far.

Or if you prefer a video montage, Nvidia have that as well.

It isn’t just about the faster cards or the DLSS inclusion, as 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.