Today's NVIDIA's big announcements and we finally get the official word on the next generation of video cards. The GeForce RTX 4090 and the GeForce RTX 4080 will be the next iterations for NVIDIA using an architecture code named Ada Lovelace.
NVIDIA says the GeForce RTX 4090 will be up to 4X better than the GeForce RTX 3090 and be available on October 12th starting at $1599.
For the GeForce RTX 4080, there will be two variants initially with versions containing 16GB of memory starting at $1199 and one with 12GB of memory starting at $899 to be released in November.
NVIDIA also announced DLSS 3, which is set to produce whole images now rather than pixels. If it's as good as DLSS 2.0, we're in for a real treat in performance uplift. NVIDIA is also claiming up to 4X performance when using DLSS 3. To me it sounds a little bit like VR's Spacewarp capabilities, which in the VR world works really well. I'll get some clarification if it's similar in nature to that technology.
During the presentation today, they also showed off some games that have been improved upon with RTX. Specifically, the Valve classic Portal was shown with full ray tracing and DLSS 3 making the classic game look incredible with new lighting effects and realistic reflections.
Cyberpunk 2077, notorious for bringing computers to their knees when turning on ray tracing and at higher resolutions, was shown to improve performance greatly with DLSS 3.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is very CPU dependent, but DLSS 3 shows it can help increase those frame rates when flying around. If they can maintain the image quality with DLSS 3 and offer up this improved performance as shown in the video, it's going to be a game changer for flight sim addicts in getting a much better experience.
We should have reviews of the cards when they are released, but it looks like these cards will offer up some pretty powerful gaming performance. Now we'll have to see if they are good on energy consumption, cooling, and acoustics when running in your PC.
