The Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series and the problem with leaks

rockpapershotgun.com:

It’s kind of remarkable how little we really know about Nvidia’s next gaming graphics cards, the RTX 40 series. AMD are openly working on next-gen, RDNA 3-based Radeon GPUs, and Intel are gearing up for the full launch of their Arc Alchemist cards before the end of summer – yet there’s not been so much as a single presentation slide on Nvidia’s wares. Not the kind of hype-building you’d expect, given how many of the current generation’s best graphics cards have GeForce badges.

Arriving to fill that info void are, inevitably, leaks. If you don’t regularly hang out in PC hardware circles, know that there’s a veritable cottage industry of in-the-know insiders: anonymous but widely known tipsters like Greymon55 and kopite7kimi, who’ve shared enough accurate details on previous GPU and CPU launches that at least some of their sources are solid. Recently, unannounced Nvidia cards like the RTX 4070, RTX 4080 and especially the RTX 4090 have become this industry’s hottest commodities, meaning leakers are also the primary source of GeForce details for the gaming tech world at large.

I’m not here to dunk on leaks. Leaks can be fun, and leaks can be accurate, and sometimes they’re both. But amidst the excitement of sneaking a peek at future tech, and the feeling that you might have just bested the corporate PR machine, a diet that consists solely of Twitter tips can blind us to their limitations as an information source.

The rise in RTX 40 leaks might actually be the most perfect example I’ve seen of this because, by leakers’ own admissions, most of the meaningful details on these graphics cards are in flux. They’re still in development, and almost everything we as PC owners would want to know about them is subject to