(Credit: AMD)
In the never-ending struggle for dominance in the graphics card market, Nvidia has announced the return of super-charged desktop GPUs. These new Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards live up to their name, as they are super-charged replacements to existing Nvidia products with significantly more muscle and even more alluring prices.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super
These new RTX 40-series Super graphics cards are truly on another level from Nvidia’s initial RTX 40-series offerings. More performance is always welcome but not something you always want to pay for. With these Super cards, you get a healthy performance improvement without the extra cost, which makes them a clear win for everyone except AMD.
(Credit: Nvidia)The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is the golden child for this launch, as it’s priced at $999. This makes it a full $200 cheaper than the original Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and sets it up to spar head-to-head with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX that also costs $999. Without a price cut from AMD, this is a fight that Nvidia is likely to win. You can see our review of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX to get a better idea, but at $999 the RTX 4080 Super will be hard to pass up.
(Credit: Nvidia)The GeForce RTX 4080 Super also ships with a higher core count, slightly elevated clock speeds, and faster GDDR6X memory. The graphics card is still based on the same AD103 GPU die as the standard RTX 4080, but with the entire die enabled, giving it 10,240 CUDA cores to the RTX 4080’s 9,728. A modest bump of 5% that is matched with more texture mapping units (TMUs) and ray-tracing (RT) cores to boost performance across the board. Granted, a 5% boost isn’t huge but, coming with a price cut, what’s not to love?
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super
With the other new Super graphics cards, we unfortunately don’t get any price cuts, but the performance enhancements are almost as dramatic and help to increase value. When it launched, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti utilized a fully enabled AD104 GPU die, but its replacement, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, will use the AD103 GPU die that forms the backbone of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super.
(Credit: Nvidia)This sets the new RTX 4070 Ti Super up closer to the higher-end RTX 4080 than the non-Super 4070 Ti, and indeed this is what we see. You'll get a 10% increase in the number of CUDA cores, going from 7,680 to 8,448, and even larger changes elsewhere. The number of raster operations per second (ROPs) on the 4070 Ti Super is 40% higher than its non-Super variant, and its memory system has improved greatly, too.
The RTX 4070 Ti Super will ship with not only faster GDDR6X memory but it will have 16GB of RAM instead of the 12 found on the RTX 4070 Ti. Even better, the memory interface is now 256-bit wide, giving the card an enormous increase in bandwidth. Between the faster RAM and wider interface, the RTX 4070 Ti Super has roughly 33% more memory bandwidth than its predecessor. And all these improvements come with no additional cost: The RTX 4070 Ti Super is priced at $799—just like the RTX 4070 Ti was when it launched.
RTX 4070 Super
With the non-Ti Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, we don’t see quite as much change. The RTX 4070 Super doesn’t benefit from getting faster GDDR6X memory or from an increase in memory capacity. Instead its improvements are the most straightforward with a roughly 22% increase in all shading resources. Still, that’s a significant increase and, like with the RTX 4070 Ti Super, it comes with no additional charge.
(Credit: Nvidia)Nvidia doesn’t plan to remove the original GeForce RTX 4070 from the market but instead has dropped its price from $599 to $549. This leaves the $599 price point open for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super to take, though with such a slight price difference it’ll be a lot harder to recommend the non-Super RTX 4070 without cost cuts. It’s simply overshadowed entirely by the RTX 4070 Super, which is sure to be a lot faster.
Pulling Off a Superhero Landing in January
The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series Super graphics cards are all set to be released over the next few weeks. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is scheduled for launch on Jan. 31, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super arrives on Jan. 24, and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 will drop on Jan. 17.
(Credit: Nvidia)Following the launch, the non-super Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will be retired, as they have been effectively replaced. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 (non-Ti) will linger on in the market for a while longer, but as I said, without further price cuts it will be much harder to sell. Stay tuned for full reviews of all of these new supercharged GPUs in the coming weeks.