Serial leaker and Youtuber ‘Moore’s Law is Dead’ (MLID) has announced new details of Nvidia’s next gen GPU’s and RTX 4000 series cards.
The flagship model of the new range, codenamed “Lovelace”, will be the RTX 4090 and feature the AD102 GPU. Performance increase targets were first reported to be 60 – 80% over Nvidia’s current flagship cards from a 400-450W chip.
However, reports of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPU’s are claiming to outperform Lovelace in rasterization. As a result, the TDP target of the AD102 was increased to 450-550W, and one of MLID sources claimed numbers as high as 500-600W.
The new RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 models are reported to have as high as 110% better rasterization performance over the current RTX 3090 flagship.
As impressive as these power gains are, it means that current users power supplies may not be able to keep up with the new cards. For context, the current RTX 3090 maxes out at 350W and the RTX 3090 Ti is rumoured to peak at 450W. Jumps to 600W are extremely significant, which ignited discussion online, debating on how much power would be needed for new top of the line CPU and GPU’s.
Expecting i9 13900K + RTX 4090 Ti recommand PSU at least 1000W GOLD
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) January 16, 2022
1000W is not enough. I don't know whether it is 4090 or 4090TI, but there is a model that can reach 600W.
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) January 16, 2022
The issues for Nvidia don’t end there, however. Supply problems with their current cards thanks to silicon shortages, production issues caused by the pandemic, competition from crypto miners, scalpers and demand that is higher than ever have made obtaining a Nvidia graphics card insanely difficult.
Beyond power gains, MLID reported that the memory controllers of the new RTX 4000 range are considerably better than those of the RTX 3000 series. The new range was designed to handle GDDR7 memory speeds and may even support GDDR7 in the future. However it is expected that GDDR7 may not be ready for the Lovelace launch, and the fastest GDDR memory available will be used instead.
However as a result, Nvidia may launch the RTX 5000 series with GDDR7 as soon as 2023, in response to a potential defeat by AMD’s RDNA 3.
MLID believes that Nvidia will hold a “paper launch” for the new RTX 4000 range of GPU’s by the close of the third quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, the RTX 3090 TI will launch on March 29, according to reports.
