Nvidia’s RTX 4090, if that’s what the next-gen Lovelace flagship graphics card ends up being called, could be twice as fast as the RTX 3090, and likely faster than that, by way of a new leak .
This comes from Kopite7kimi, a prolific leaker on Twitter, who tweeted somewhat cryptically about next-gen performance relating to the RTX 3090.
It’s pretty straightforward to hit the 2x performance of the RTX 3090. Expect further optimization.May 11, 2022
Obviously the suggestion is that the RTX 4090, the successor to the 3090, will be at least twice as fast, and from the wording here, probably faster than that – or that’s how we read it, from anyway. If it’s “simple enough” to double the performance of the flagship, then perhaps we could expect more than that from Nvidia (with “some further optimisation” certainly).
Of course, any leaks should be taken with caution, and that’s especially true with a vague hint like this.
Kopite7kimi also fair tweeted to reaffirm that the specs of the RTX 4090 that were previously shared are still theoretically correct, which is that it will use 24GB of GDDR6X video RAM running at 21Gbps, with a power draw of 600W. Additionally, the leaker has added that the RTX 4070 will use 12GB of GDDR6 running at 18Gbps, with a power consumption of 300W (again, no new information except for VRAM speed).
Analysis: Performance at the rendezvous, but at what price?
Nvidia’s RTX 4090 being twice as fast as the 3090, or even faster than that, aligns with the general claims that have come out rumored in the past. We assume this is of course about rasterization (standard rendering) rather than ray tracing performance, but this is not clarified.
However, the price to pay for this kind of performance will supposedly be heavy in terms of power consumption, and we shudder at the thought of what kind of PSU will be needed to safely drive a beefy GPU. which calls for 600W (remember, the RTX 3090 gobbles up a lot less than that, even if it’s un-ecological at 350W).
Naturally, the kind of people who are considering buying an Nvidia flagship won’t be short on cash – things cost a fortune anyway – but the possibility of having to shell out for an expensive mega-crass power supply on top of that. The GPU will hardly be welcome (nor the hassle of upgrading the PSU).
Especially not if AMD’s next-gen RDNA 3 models end up being a lot more power efficient, as rumored, while delivering a big leap in performance (although ray tracing might be a different matter traditional rasterization in AMD vs Nvidia frame rate battlefield).
This is all firmly in the territory of speculation and conjecture, naturally, so let’s not get carried away with any of these assumptions or rumors here. That said, before the original post, Kopite7kimi did Tweeter to just say “things got interesting”, so this is another hint that something major is going on for Team Green…