NVIDIA GeForce Series 40 (RTX 4000) - performance and power consumption

[RuneSR2]

Good to be back - could not login for about 24 hours. And it seems first results (estimations?) have emerged for Nvidia Series 40 - as usual take it with a pinch of salt, these are also synthetic results:

Over here power prices are getting close to $1.5/kwh - so there's this too:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Ti (48 GB 600W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24 GB 450W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (16 GB 340W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (12 GB 285W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8 GB 235W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 (8 GB 150W)

Source for all of the above: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-rtx-4060-specs-performance-rumor-over-2-6-ghz-gpu-cl...

There's not much green nor "save the planet" in the Series 40 - actually the worst power consumption ever seen - going totally the wrong way. We need more performance using less power, not more performance using a lot more power. 2c.

- and remember, do not buy any of the above, before Meta officially supports the cards - if you care for VR 😉

[RuneSR2]

The cat is out of the bag - more or less:

uploadvr.com/nvidia-rtx-4080-4090-ada-lovelace/

Asus Strix RTX 4090:

One problem may be the power consumption, Asus now recommends 1000 - 1200w psus, while the recommended 850w for my Asus Strix OC RTX 3090. Corsair also just stated that they are ready with a 1500w psu for the new video cards. Not sure that'll make our planet much greener, lol. Never thought it would happen, but now I can tell the wife that compared to Nvidia's new high-end king, my video card is much more green and environment-friendly 😉 It seems that while a 3090 needed about 350w, expect about 500w for the 4090. If you're going for a plain-vanilla 4090, a 850w psu should be fine - but going for a high-end factory oc'ed version, you many need more (also depending on your cpu). 

And older psus may not work with the new 4080-4090 due to requirements for psu connection and the plugs (proper psus should be able to deliver 600w on a single line). More here:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/geforce-rtx-4090-600w-power-draw

Nvidia has posted amazing performance results, but beware that these may primarily be using the new DLSS3. Many games do not support DLSS3. According the some on Reddit, the 4080 12GB may be about 25% faster than the 3080 - so for now, don't trust claims of 2-4x better performance. 

[Mradr]

haha don't do it xD these cards are broken as heck. Something really off about what they are doing here with them and its pretty crazy from all the bad press they are getting off it right now. 

[RuneSR2]

Another blasphemer making fun of the 4090 😄

[RuneSR2]

A good thing about RTX 40 Series may be that we get Portal with raytracing and more:

Free if you own the game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012840/Portal_with_RTX/

Arriving in November 2022 - some shots:

    

[DaftnDirect]

The situation with nvidia is really frustrating. I'm so overdue for a new GPU but nothing in this series is appealing. The 30 series wasn't either, but for price and power consumption reasons rather than performance.

I know it may not be popular to harp on about power usage as a priority, but I've set myself a limit of 250W tdp for the GPU as that's where I am now, I just don't want to exceed that for several reasons.

I've mentioned before, there's no information on cable size requirements and connector type requirements beyond saying that companies should use 'industry best practice', what you have inside your PC is no longer fit for purpose if we're talking about 450W at 12V... that's 37.5 amps. From my engineering days, that means 4mm cables and connections that are positively clamped, not push-fit. No wonder there are stories now of burned out connectors. Some reviewers are saying that cable routing is the problem... having bends too close to the connectors but jeez, the connectors have to be suitable for all likely scenarios, and no-one seems to be talking about the cable sizes.

Add to this the hot environment inside even a well-designed case. I think we're getting to the point where legislation is going to have to be introduced to have systems above a certain total power, being designed and built by qualified companies not by induvial gamers and apply industry electrical standards to the cabling and connectors... in the UK, that's the IET regs.

The 4080 12GB goes over that by 30-40W but it comes close to a 3090ti in performance, so ok, if AMD don't bring something better, I may be swayed... we need straight comparisons, real world reviews that don't include DLSS 3, particularly for VR as we have ASW.

Performance per watt and performance per price isn't making huge strides and it's not helping me spend more time in PCVR which I'm keen to do.

I think that non-gaming incentives have well and truly taken over as nvidia's business model, digital currency mining when bitcoin prices are high and it's financially viable, then Enterprise AI market when it isn't. Gaming is served by adding software features like DLSS3 and making that series exclusive so that it looks like hardware progress.

Gaming may be a small proportion of their market these days but it'll stay that way if they don't drop prices and increase hardware performance more.

PCVR may end up benefiting from console gaming for providing AMD with incentives to focus on gaming performance improvements.

Rant over!

[RuneSR2]

250w is a nice target, and I doubt 4080 will need less than 350w and probably closer to 400w, but we'll see in a few weeks.

4060 and 4070 may be more interesting, and may keep under 300w, while still offer awesome performance.

3060 Ti is quite good - one of my friends bought one, he's got my old rig with an i7 7700K and a Corsair 550w psu. Asus RTX 3060 Ti works fine with the psu and consumes about 210 - 230w. Performance lies between a RTX 2080 Super and 2080 Ti. 

[DaftnDirect]

i wonder what the 4070 will be because the 12GB 4080 looks suspiciously like a what the 4070 should have been, with reduced CUDA cores compared with the 16GB, i heard itll have a reduced tdp also of 280 watts or there abouts but i may have read it wrong... its priced as i would have expected a 4080 to be though, which isnt helping. Not sure when AMD are due to release there cards, any idea?

[RuneSR2]

I've got no clue about AMD's next move, also read that some of their recent cards had trouble getting VR working properly, so lately these cards have not been a focus of mine - and Meta may be a while supporting new AMD cards. Also AMD held a nice show introducing the 6950XT and promised it would not be a paper launch - and then made maybe the worst paper launch ever, lol. Nividia may not be much better with all the trouble they had with the 3090 Ti and non-working Rift-S and HP G2 (maybe more hmds) due to some DisplayPort incompatibility, not sure it has been solved. Looks like Nvidia forgot to test VR hmds before launching the 3090 Ti.  

I waited buying the RTX 3090 until Meta had announced that the card was fully supported (and Tom had tested that the CV1 worked flawlessly) - I'd be careful buying any gpu until it's listed as fully supported by Meta - and/or until some users have tested that everything works. Better safe than sorry. 

TechPowerUp, after Anandtech stopped testing gpus, is my favorite site for gpu reviews. They thoroughly test power consumption too, I'm sure we'll get all there's to know about 4080 and 4090 power consumption October 12 or close 🙂

For now these estimations are the best I know of - and maybe 4080 12GB will be close to what's listed below as the 4070, the 4080 12GB does look suspiciously close to a 4070:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24 GB 450W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (16 GB 340W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (12 GB 285W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8 GB 235W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 (8 GB 150W)

These values may be for the plain vanilla cards, Asus already upped recommended PSUs from 850w (Asus Strix 3090) to 1000 - 1200w (Asus Strix 4090), smells more like 500+ w for their 4090s than 450w. I usually go for the more pumped up cards by MSI or Asus, also to get the biggest and most quiet air-cooled solutions 🙂 A normal GTX 1080 used about 180w in 2016, but MSI's oc'ed Gaming X GTX 1080 with much bigger cooler used 250w. So much may depend on the manufacturer, choice of cooling and factory overclocking... 

Availability for the 4000 Series will be interesting too, I'm not holding my breath this time 🙂 

[RuneSR2]

This does start to look incredible, but with the RTX 3090 so far ahead of other video cards, question is how many really need an RTX 4090 (besides me wanting to play Green Hell VR in high res, lol):

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-3dmark-scores-leaked-at-least-82-faster-than-rtx...