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Nvidia RTX 4080 and 4090’s high price mean it’s worth waiting for the RTX 4060
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OPINION: This week Nvidia revealed the first two entries in its newRTX 4000-series.
And, while we’re yet to benchmark the newRTX 4090andRTX 4080, from what we’ve seen they’re set to be very impressive upgrades on the already impressive 30-series GPUs, which I reviewed when they launched two years ago.
Highlights include general spec upgrades to both: moreCUDA Cores, more GDDR6X memory, the debut of Nvidia’s3rd Generation RT Cores and 4th Generation Tensor Cores plus slightly better TDPs (power consumption). The latter is particularly important as the 30-series cards were monster trucks that required a very powerfulPSUto run when I benchmarked them.
To people that don’t obsess over GPU specs, but just want to play games faster and at higher frame rates, according to Nvidia, this means the RTX 4090 is between 2x and 4x faster thanRTX 3090 Tiand the RTX 4080 is between 2x and 4x faster than theRTX 3080 Tidepending on the title you’re running.
Considering the fact I could already get games to run at playable, post 30fps speeds on the baseRTX 3080with their graphics maxed andray tracingon in 4K, if any of that rings true when we test the new cards, then they’ll be the fastest we’ve ever seen.
And while there’s a lot to get excited about there, there’s one big fly in the ointment: their cost. The new Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics will cost $1599/£1679 starting price. That’s a $100 increase on what the 3090 cost at launch. The Nvidia RTX 4080 16GB and 12GB have starting prices of $1199/£1269 and $899/£949, respectively
Even if you’re cash rich, those aren’t cheap investments. The cost of living crisis also means many will need to question if now’s the right time to spend over a grand on a card to play games, especially one that eats so much electricity.
This is why for me, though they’re exciting, it’s another card that Nvidia’s yet to launch that’ll be more important in the long term. Specifically, my money is on the RTX 4060 to be the most successful and widely usedLovelaceGPU when it finally arrives.
To caveat, this isn’t an official card yet, I’m basing it on my experience testing previous Nvidia 60 cards, like theRTX 3060 Ti, which I gave 4/5 when I reviewed it and to this day list as thebest GPUfor 1080p ray tracing.
60 cards tend to be the ones that hit the sweet spot for price and performance, offering reliable enough speeds for 1080p gaming with ray tracing and 1440p without it.
This, in my mind, is a key reason that year-on-year Steam lists 60 cards as the most used on its platform. Jump over to the latestAugust 2022 Steam surveyand you’ll see it’s not 80 or 90 cards that top the list. The top 10 most used cards in August are mostly 60 and 50 series:
Despite being excited at a technical level for the premium cards, and very keen to see how they perform when we benchmark them in our test rig, I can’t help but think the biggest Lovelace release from Nvidia is yet to come.
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Alastair is in charge of Trusted Reviews Limited’s editorial strategy and output across all its sites. He has over a decade’s experience as a journalist working in both B2C and B2B press. During this …
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Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
