Is The Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Series Worth it? Release Date, Specs and Price

In an absolute surprise to no one, Nvidia officially revealed their Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series of graphics cards, but are they worth it? And what’s the release date, specs and price? The RTX 4080 12GB, 4080 16GB and 4090 represent a change of pace for the hardware giants, opting for fewer lines and more power, but are they necessary? Let’s get into it:

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RTX 40 Series Release Date – Is the RTX 40 Series Worth It?

The RTX 40 Series release date situation is a bit strange right now. Nvidia has confirmed the RTX 4090 will release on 12 October 2022, with other models TBA. Rumour is that they’ll follow the RTX 4090 and be out for Christmas 2022.

RTX 40 Series Specs – Is RTX 40 Series Worth It?

Slapping their new 4nm Ada Lovelace architecture and upgraded DLSS 3.0 technology into a beautiful metal and plastic sandwich of dreams is an achievement in itself. We may romanticise the RTX 40 series specs, but they are a big deal.

In a nutshell, the 40 series is pushing a two-to-four performance boost compared to the high-end RTX 3 series we all know and love. Yes, that means the RTX 3080Ti and RTX 3090Ti won’t be top dogs for much longer.

There’s better power efficiency and improved performance from the TSMC CO-Developed Ada Lovelace chip in these bad boys, but that’s not the only features available for drooling over:

• 76 billion transistors
• 90 Shader TLOPs via a new streaming multiprocessor
• 200 RT TFLOPs with 2x ray-triangle intersection (Long story short, ray tracing looks better)
• 1400 Tensor TFLOPs (Deep machine learning courtesy of Google)
• Shader Execution Reordering

All these strange words and prominent figures sure look impressive, but is the RTX 40 Series Worth It?

Sure, if players, developers and designers want absolute top-end graphics cards with loads of headroom. But let’s think about this logically for a moment. Most PC Gamers aim for 60 FPS + @ 1440P gameplay, which can easily be achieved for most high-end games on a current generation RTX 3070. Even the laptop version of the high-end RTX 30 series can handle this with no problem.

If this sounds familiar, there’s not much point in spending a small fortune on the RTX 40 series unless we’re talking high framerates, 4K resolutions and high ray tracing settings.

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RTX 40 Series Price

Let’s not forget the graphics card shortages that are pushing demand and pricing higher and higher. The new RTX 40 series price will be more expensive than the equivalent model number in the RTX 30 series by at least £100/$100. We’re not saying it’s not worth the money; we’re saying that there are not many games on the market right now that will push the technology in the RTX 40 series enough to warrant the expense.

Here are the current confirmed price points:

• Nvidia RTX 4080 (12GB) – from $899
• Nvidia RTX 4090 – from $1599

The Nvidia RTX (16GB) model pricing hasn’t been confirmed yet, nor has any pricing for the rest of the world, but we expect it to be closer to the 4080 range than the 4090.

Of course, if a new laptop or prebuilt PC comes with the RTX 40 series, users would be silly not to invest and push their new rigs to the limits. But for existing high-end RTX 30 users and bargain hunters? There’s nothing that the current gen of Nvidia graphics cards can’t handle.