Nvidia’s onto its newest generation of graphics cards, but its first two forays into the RTX 4000 line haven’t been as smooth as the graphics they render. We’ve already got the massive RTX 4090 and its only slightly more reasonable cousin, the RTX 4080 16GB, but this October saw Nvidia trot out an unusual term — unlaunch — to say it was taking the more budget-oriented RTX 4080 12GB (which was proposed to come with less performant specs at a lower cost) back to the drawing board.
It wasn’t strictly cancelled, and now we know why. Nvidia’s trotting out the card again under a new name. The RTX 4070 Ti, announced during Nvidia’s special CES address appears nearly identical to the 4080 12GB but is coming to us at a lower cost – we think. At $US799 ($1,109 in Aussie terms), rather than the $US899 ($1,248) proposed for the 4080 12GB, the RTX 4070 Ti boasts 40 shader TFLOPs, 93 RT TFLOPs, and 641 Tensor TFLOPs. Those aren’t the most telling specs, but they’re all we have to go on for now. However, Nvidia’s promising up to two-times the performance of the 3090 Ti, the flagship from its last generation of graphics cards.
“It will max out your 1440p gaming monitor, delivering over 120fps on modern games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer 40K: Darktide, F1 2022, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales,” said Jeff Fisher, Nvidia’s SVP of gaming.
“With the power of DLSS 3, the RTX 4070 Ti delivers 1.8x performance across a range of titles, while consuming almost half the power.”
That’s in line with the promises it previously made for its “unlaunched” card, echoing the October announcement that the RTX 4080 12GB was “fantastic,” but “not named right.” Critics accused the 4080 12GB of simply being a 4070 rebrand, and with this announcement, those concerns appear to have been vindicated.
At any rate, gamers can get the 4070 Ti for $US799 ($1,109, but Aussie pricing isn’t yet confirmed) starting on January 5.
RTX 40 Series of laptops
For those with a more portable lifestyle, Nvidia’s also finally putting its new generation of mobile GPUs into laptops, with support for its DLSS 3 upscaling tech and options ranging from RTX 4050 to RTX 4090. It’s a bit odd to see laptop GPUs for cards that don’t have desktop counterparts yet, but not wholly surprising — laptop cards are so different that their namesakes often only bear spiritual resemblance to them.
Nvidia reckons the new GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops are up to three-times more power efficient than the previous generation and bring the Ada architecture, Nvidia DLSS 3 and fifth-generation Max-Q technologies to laptops for the first time.
The claim is that the RTX 40 Series laptops deliver up to four-times the performance in AAA games.
“Powered by RTX 40 Series Laptop GPUs, 14-inch laptops are also gaming powerhouses, up to twice as fast as a PlayStation 5 but one-sixth the size,” Fisher reckons.
Some standout features of the RTX 4090 and 4080 laptops include the ability to play on three 4K monitors for surround gaming at 60 frames per second (enough to power a professional-grade driving simulator) and they’re also capable of letting you livestream games at 4K 60 fps with AV1 encoding to Discord.
Meanwhile, the new RTX 4070, 4060 and 4050 laptops promise to be faster than the previous-generation flagship model, using as little as one-third the GPU power. They deliver 80 fps, 1440p ultra-gaming and transform creation processes like rendering scenes in Blender (which previously took 2.5 hours, to just 10 minutes).
The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 machines will cost $US1,999 (AU pricing not yet known) and will be available February 8, while the RTX 4050 laptops start at $US999 and will be available from February 22.
Manufacturers on board include. They will also be available from local makers and system builders, including CyberPower PC, Eluktronics, Hasee, PC Specialist 3XS by Scan and Schenker.
We can expect details for laptops containing these cards to be coming from manufacturers like Acer, Alienware, ASUS, Dell, GIGABYTE, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer and Samsung shortly, but Nvidia did say that laptops containing the mobile versions of the RTX 4080 and 4090 will launch on February 8 for a starting price of $US1,999 (about $2,775, but AU pricing not yet confirmed) and February 22 for the RTX 4050 at $US999.