Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series - everything we know so far

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With the RTX 40 series graphics cards finally being officially announced, everyone is super excitied to get their hands on the new tech and really see what they have to offer. For the past few years it has been notoriously hard to get your hards on the best graphics cards for gaming, but these new series cards have finally arrived at a time when it is much easier to pick one up. Hopefully this means buying a new graphics card won’t be too difficult.

We’re seeing some amazing performance coming from these new cards, even compared to the highest end RTX 3090 Ti, meaning no matter what you are currently sporting, picking up a 40 series card will be an upgrade.

Below we’re bringing you everything we know about possible RTX 40 specifications, potential release windows, and what to expect from Nvidia’s latest GPU line.

What is the release date for the RTX 40 series?

We have currently got a confirmed date for the release of the RTX 4090 card, which is October 12. We are currently not sure which retailers it will be available at, but the Nvidia page has a button to allow you to ‘Notify Me’ when it drops.

The RTX 4080, which has also already been announced, is a little bit more vague in the release date, with Nvidia confirming a November release but not providing a specific day in said month. Rumors have stated this will be in the first two weeks.

The rest of the cards we are hoping to see come from the 40 series, including the 4070, 4060, and 4050 cards, are yet to be announced so we don’t have a confirmed release date for these.

When taking the 30 series into account, the first of the RTX 30 series to be released after the announcement was the RTX 3080. The weaker models then came shortly after, meaning we are hoping to see them very soon. With Ampere, the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti followed later; the former launched in October and the latter in December of the same year.

What will the RTX 40-Series price be?

The price points of these cards are actually quite high above our predictions. With the higher-end Nvidia RTX 4090 coming in at $1,599 / £1,679, and the Nvidia RTX 4080, with two dedicated memory options, coming in at $899 / £949 (12GB) or $1269 / £1269 (16GB).

We originally predicted the cards would come in at around $699 for the RTX 4080 so being $200 over these predictions is quite surprising. However, we still have our hopes quite high that the lower level cards, such as the 4060 and 4050, will be much more affordable.

When considering budget graphics cards, the RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 launched at very similar price points of $329 and $349. This leads us to believe that an entry-level Lovelace GPU at release could cost around the $350 mark. However, when considering how much higher the new series has shown itself to be so far, it’s likely this figure could be closer to $400 to $450.

Nvidia chip

(Image credit: Nvidia)

How much more powerful could the RTX 40 series be?

	Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB)	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 (12GB)
NVIDIA CUDA Cores	9728	8960
Boost Clock	2.51 GHz	1.71 GHz
Memory Size	16 GB	12 GB
Memory Type	GDDR6X	GDDR6X
Ray Tracing Cores	3rd Gen	2nd Gen
MRSP / RRP	$1269 / £1269	$699 / £649

Nvidia has claimed that the RTX 4080 will boast over three times relative performance when compared to the RTX 3080 Ti. The 40 series cards also come with a new third generation of ray tracing cores, whereas the 30 series cards feature second generation cards, meaning you can experience virtual worlds like never before.

One of the major factors people were wondering about was whether or not the new series cards would be majorly power-hungry. Now that we have the specs, we can say that they won’t need a 1500w PSU in order to run, which we originally thought may have been the case.

Nvidia GDDR6

(Image credit: Nvidia)

The increase in bandwidth brought about by PCIe 5.0 is going to show just how much faster Lovelace is going to be over Ampere. Current PCIe 8-pin power connectors only supply 150w max, so that’s a huge jump up for sure. You’ll need one of the best gaming PCs to fully take advantage of the RTX 40 series.

It’s important to note that only Intel 12th gen processors, some of the best CPUs for gaming, have support for PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, which is going to be used in tandem with Lovelace to push the power potential.

Will the RTX 40 series be more available than Ampere?

Even though we have announcements regarding the new cards, we still can’t confirm whether or not the cards will be more available or not.

The poor availability of Ampere, and overall graphics card shortage, have many wondering just how available the RTX 40 series is going to be. Originally reported by PCMag (opens in new tab), a recent Nvidia investors event saw Nvidia CFO Colette Kress address the current shortages: “Even during this period of COVID and supply constraints, it’s been interesting because it’s given us the opportunity for gaming to continue to sell both the current generation (RTX 3000) as well as the Turing generation (the RTX 2000 series)”.

From this quote, we can theorize that it’s a strong possibility both Ampere and Lovelace could co-exist at the end of 2022 and throughout the early months of 2023. What’s more, Kress was also quoted saying how: “We will continue to work on supply. I think we’ll be in a good supply situation in the second half,” in relation to graphics card stock improving towards the end of the year. If it’s true, this is certainly a good sign of things to come, and we’ve seen GPU prices slowly decline since the start of 2022 as well, meaning the RTX 40 series could launch in a substantially healthier fashion.

Ultimately, though, we’ll believe it when we see it. Considering the RTX 3070 prices and RTX 3080 prices right now, having widespread availability of Lovelace GPUs for MSRP upon release would be nothing short of miraculous. With the RTX 3090 Ti on the horizon, the launch of the BFGPU refresh will be a good indication as to the authenticity of these comments when that model releases in the near future.

We’ll be bringing you more on the RTX 40 series release date and price as soon as the information is hot off the presses. Until then, you can find current generation GPUs inside some of the best gaming laptops and cheap gaming PCs, too.