Nvidia reveal the GeForce RTX 4080, RTX 4090, and Portal RTX

rockpapershotgun.com:

As expected, Nvidia have announced the GeForce RTX 4090 during their GeForce Beyond livestream – and confirmed the RTX 4080 for good measure. Both GPUs are based on Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace architecture, and will launch this year: the RTX 4090 on October 12th, and the RTX 4080 sometime in November.

Key features of Ada Lovelace, and thus these new cards, include 3rd Gen RT cores, 4th Gen Tensor cores, and a new streaming multiprocessor. These supposedly add up to twice the performance of Ampere (that’s the RTX 30 series architecture currently dominating our best graphics card guide) in standard rasterised games, and up to four times the performance in ray traced games. And since Nvidia were clearly in a ray-tracey mood, they also took the opportunity to reveal Portal RTX: a semi-official mod for the original Portal that upgrades it with RT lighting and reflection effects. Corrrr.

First, though, those GPUs. The RTX 4090 packs 24GB of GDDR6X RAM and will cost $1599; that puts it only a few hundred dollars below the RTX 3090 Ti, though Nvidia say it outperforms the top-tier Ampere GPU by up to four times. There will be two versions of the RTX 4080, meanwhile: a 12GB GDDR6X model starting at $899, and a 16GB model starting at $1199. These are both considerably pricier than the RTX 3080, which launched at $699, though at least the 16GB model is meant to be up to four times quicker than the RTX 3080 Ti. I've asked for UK prices and will update this article if I get 'em.

If they can reach the hallowed grounds of a 4x performance boost, it will likely be with ray tracing and, especially, DLSS. Ada Lovelace’s “Shader Execution Reordering” feature reschedules RT workloads on the fly, so the GPU can process ray traced frames