IN A TEASER leading up to the Ada Lovelace and RTX 40-series announcement, Nvidia had a phone number asking, “Tell us, how fast do you want to go?” Perhaps KITT—that’s the ‘Knight Industries Two Thousand’, if you weren’t around in the 1980s—has finally arrived in the real world, except now he’s a GPU instead of a souped-up Pontiac Trans Am. If you want to take Nvidia at its word, the apparent answer is two to four times faster than the RTX 3090 Ti.
However, there are a lot of caveats with those claims. In some scenarios, like with the new DLSS 3 algorithm and running extreme levels of ray tracing, that four-times difference in performance between the current generation RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090 might materialize. In more typical gaming scenarios, especially without DLSS 3, we expect the gains to be smaller, but still substantial.
We’re going to take a deep dive into everything that makes Nvidia’s new RTX 40-series graphics cards tick. We have specifications on the first three announced models and their respective GPUs, access to the RTX 4090, and a whole load of technical documents. We also need to discuss pricing, the current GPU oversupply situation, and the end of Moore’s Law. So get comfortable, grab your favorite beverage, and let’s meet Ada Lovelace.
DIALING UP CORE COUNTS AND CLOCK SPEEDS
Fundamentally, a big part of what makes a GPU fast comes from the core and clock speeds. With CPUs,
