Tech
Nvidia unveils new high-end RTX 4090 GPU after miners gobbled up the previous one
CTN NEWS – Nvidia released its new graphics cards, the RTX 4-series, including the $1,599 flagship RTX 4090 and slightly less expensive 4080.
The upgrade comes at an interesting time for PC users, who have been starved out of the GPU market by crypto miners for years and now have the choice of their long-awaited older cards or the shiny (and expensive) new ones.
The 4-series is a big upgrade from the 3-series, which dominated the crypto mining scene and a few other computation-hungry applications and was bought in bulk by bots and other shady operations.
This had the effect of reducing availability to practical nil and inflating the price of the powerful cards. It was an opportunity Nvidia’s eternal rival AMD jumped on, emphasizing price and efficiency — more power per dollar — and the fact that you could actually buy their cards.
Nvidia is back with its next-gen GPUs
Nvidia is back and making a play for the whales with its next-gen GPUs, which for the present will no doubt be the most powerful ones out there by a long shot. AMD has its next-gen debut coming up as well, though Nvidia tends to maintain the status of “fastest card, at what cost?”
In addition to increasing the number of cores, processors, shaders, and the requisite jump in performance seen in today’s games, Nvidia is pushing its new “Ada Lovelace” architecture.
This accelerates special processes that improve image quality, like ray tracing for lighting and Deep Learning Super Sampling, a complicated frame generation technique that increases frame rates and visual fidelity.
They crow about the capabilities at length here. As a demo of some of the techniques, Nvidia worked with Valve to reimagine the classic mind-bending first-person puzzler Portal, which will get ray tracing and DLSS in a new version.
It also includes tensor cores focused on AI-adjacent operations, which should allow the new GPUs to perform both AI-powered graphics operations and pure neural network stuff (like running Stable Diffusion) faster and better.
The GPU has graduated from being a tool for keeping your games running at high frame rates to a processing powerhouse for known, computation-intensive workflows that make CPUs and older GPUs chug.
The idea of running a modern text-to-image generator or a local instance of something like GPT-3 is attractive to many for a variety of reasons and plenty of those will spend a grand for the privilege. The cards will be available starting in November.
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