NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 Series of GPUs, designed for gamers and creators, with their new ADA Lovelace architecture and DLSS 3.
The world’s first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 40 Series uses AI to generate pixels.
“The age of RTX ray tracing and neural rendering is in full steam, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, at the GeForce Beyond: Special Broadcast at GTC. “Ada provides a quantum leap for gamers and paves the way for creators of fully simulated worlds. With up to 4x the performance of the previous generation, Ada is setting a new standard for the industry,” he said.
Huang also announced NVIDIA DLSS 3 — the next revolution in the company’s Deep Learning Super Sampling neural graphics technology for games and creative apps. The AI-powered technology can generate entire frames for faster gameplay. It can overcome CPU performance limitations in games by allowing the GPU to generate entire frames independently. The technology is coming to some popular game engines, such as Unity and Unreal Engine, and has received support from many of the world’s leading game developers, with more than 35 games and apps coming soon.
Additionally, the RTX 40 Series GPUs feature a range of new technological innovations, including:
- Streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 teraflops of shader power — 2x over the previous generation.
- Third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops — 2.8x over the previous generation.
- Fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops — 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.
- Shader Execution Reordering (SER) improves execution efficiency by rescheduling shading workloads on the fly to better utilise the GPU’s resources. As significant an innovation as out-of-order execution was for CPUs, SER improves ray-tracing performance up to 3x and in-game framerates by up to 25%.
- Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, enabling the neural network to boost frame rates while maintaining image quality.
- Architectural improvements tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology results in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency.
- Dual NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC) cut export times by up to half and feature AV1 support. The NVENC AV1 encode is being adopted by OBS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Discord and more.
The new third-generation RT Cores have been enhanced to deliver 2x faster ray-triangle intersection testing and include two important new hardware units. An Opacity Micromap Engine also speeds up ray tracing of alpha-test geometry by a factor of 2x, and a Micro-Mesh Engine generates micro-meshes on the fly to generate additional geometry. The Micro-Mesh Engine provides the benefits of increased geometric complexity without the traditional performance and storage costs of complex geometries.
The RTX 40 Series GPUs and DLSS 3 deliver advancements for NVIDIA Studio creators. 3D artists can render fully ray-traced environments with accurate physics and natural materials, and view the changes in real-time, without proxies. Video editing and live streaming also get a boost from improved GPU performance and the inclusion of new dual, eighth-generation AV1 encoders. The NVIDIA Broadcast software development kit has three updates, now available for partners, including Face Expression Estimation, Eye Contact and quality improvements to Virtual Background.
NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios have used RTX Remix to reimagine Valve’s iconic video game Portal, regarded as one of the best video games of all time. Advanced graphics features such as full ray tracing and DLSS 3 give the game a striking new look and feel. Portal with RTX will be released as free, official downloadable content for the classic platformer with RTX graphics in November, just in time for Portal’s 15th anniversary.
The RTX 4090 with 24GB of Micron GDDR6X memory, and 100 frames per second at 4K-resolution gaming will be available on Wednesday, October 12, starting at USD 1,599. Additionally, the RTX 4080 will have two configurations. One with 16GB Micron GDDR6x and another with 12GB Micron GDDR6X. Both RTX 4080 will be available in November with a starting price of USD 1,199 and USD 899 respectively.
