RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4070 Super Announcement

On January 8th, 2024 Nvidia finally announced their anticipated refresh of the RTX 40 series of GPUs. The cards announced include the RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4070 Super. New GPUs are always exciting for gamers because that means higher framerates and better visuals. However, Nvidia’s 40 series has received a significant amount of criticism for the price especially, compared to the previous generation. Can this refresh of the 40 series convince gamers to upgrade?

RTX 4080 Super:

The most powerful card of the announcement is the RTX 4080 Super, designed to handle games in a stunning 4K resolution. The 4080 Super has a starting price of $999 and is available starting January 31st, 2024. This card is supposed to replace the existing RTX 4080 while also being $200 cheaper. This is a great thing to see from Nvidia because the original RTX 4080 was priced at $1199 and was a terrible value. Compared to the last generation, the RTX 3080 was priced at $699, and the RTX 3080 Ti at $999. The RTX 4080 just seemed like a foolish purchase, especially if you were coming from a 30 series card. On paper, the 4080 Super comes in with 10,240 Cuda Cores compared to the 9,728 Cuda Cores found on the 4080. Cuda Cores are proprietary processing cores created by Nvidia. Depending on the GPU architecture, more Cuda Cores will allow the card to process GPU-related information faster. In addition, Nvidia increased the boost clock speed of the 4080 Super to 2.55GHz compared to the 2.51Ghz of the 4080. Honestly, it doesn’t seem like there will be much of a performance increase, but the price cut is appreciated.

RTX 4070 Ti Super:

Next in Nvidia’s lineup is the 4070 Ti Super, an enthusiast card targeted for high fps 1440p and some 4K gaming. Similar to how the 4080 Super is replacing the 4080, the 4070 Ti Super is replacing the 4070 Ti. Nvidia has seemed to increase more than just the length of the name of the 4070 Ti. The 4070 Ti has 16GB of VRAM (Video Memory) compared to the previous 12GB. In addition to the increase of VRAM the memory bus has expanded to 256-bit compared to the previous 192-bit bus. For those who don’t know, the wider the memory bus the more information that can be transferred from the VRAM to the GPU. In other words, the wider the bus means an increase in performance. Cuda Core count has risen to 8448 in contrast to the 7680 found on the 4070 Ti. We won’t know how much of a boost it will receive over the 4070 Ti until it releases on January 24th.

4070 Super:

Last in the lineup is the 4070 Super which is a more mid to high ranged card priced at $599. The main difference between this and the 4070 is the significant increase in Cuda Cores. The original 4070 has 5888 Cuda Cores while the 4070 Super has 7168. This should help with the increase in performance especially since Nvidia has claimed that this card is faster than an RTX 3090 while at the same time consuming far less power. While it is true that the card does consume less power, Nvidia noted in the spec sheet that the average amount of power drawn during a gaming session is higher than the original 4070 despite the power requirements being identical. Nvidia likely had to tweak the power settings on the 4070 Super to surpass the 3090. While this does sound exciting please keep in mind the only testing released is Nvidia’s internal testing so take what they say with a grain of salt.

Price: 

While these GPUs are still very expensive compared to the last generation’s 30 series, Nvidia seems to be going in the right direction. I can’t help but feel that the pricing of Super Series cards should have been the price of the original cards. In other words, the RTX 4080 really should’ve been priced at $999 rather than $1199. The 40 Series has been known to be priced high and has been criticized for it. I believe it’s fair criticism especially when the 80 series card last generation was $699. The 80 series card now is almost double what it was. I understand that these new cards are faster and have new features like DLSS 3.0 but even with those features, it was hard to recommend the 40 series. Gamers purchasing a 4080 for $1199 might as well spend the extra $400 on a 4090 at MSRP. If you are already spending $1000+ on a GPU you probably have a high enough budget to consider a 4090. Even though the MSRP of these cards is cheaper it doesn’t mean it will be available for that price. The table below shows the current pricing of the 40 Series cards compared to MSRP. Most of the cards are mildly under MSRP; the 4090 price has exploded far beyond its intended price.

Final Thoughts:

The new additions to Nvidia’s 40 Series are exciting and it’s easy to be caught up in all the hype of new product launches, but until third-party benchmarking is available gamers should hold off on these cards. Some of the claims Nvidia made are bold, for example, the RTX 4070 Super being faster than the RTX 3090. This may be true for a few workloads but it’s likely the reason for this is because of DLSS 3.0. DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling which is a proprietary AI upscaling technique created by Nvidia. The goal of this technology is to render games at a lower resolution and use AI to upscale them to 4K. This takes a load off of the GPU which helps boost the frames. DLSS 3.0, available on the 40 Series only, takes this a step further and adds in Frame Generation. This essentially uses AI to generate a frame after every other frame which further increases the amount of FPS. While this is great for games not every game supports this and it’s likely in games that don’t support DLSS 3.0 the RTX 3090 is faster. Also for other non-GPU workloads, the 3090 will most likely mop the floor with the RTX 4070 Super because AI can’t help. Overall, Nvidia made some strong claims and until others review them in the tech community gamers should hold off on pulling the trigger on these cards. If you already have a 30 series card, I recommend you hold off until the 50 series. If you still have a 20 series depending on your use case they can still be perfectly viable so no need to rush for an upgrade. If you need to upgrade your GPU you should consider the used market, especially for the 30 series. Some RTX 3070s can be had for under 300 USD which is a great value! If there’s a main takeaway from this article it is to wait until benchmarks come before purchasing anything.