Graphics chip extraordinaire Nvidia has just lifted the lid on one of the worst-kept secrets in the PC hardware business at CES, with the official announcement of its new GeForce RTX Super GPU lineup. Three new graphics cards have joined the Ada party – the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4070 Super. Meanwhile, the original RTX 4080 and 4070 Ti have now been removed from Nvidia’s current GPU lineup.
The new GPUs look set to correct the mistakes of the original Nvidia Ada lineup, which were often criticized for having underwhelming specs for very high prices. While the RTX 4090 is deservedly listed on our guide to the best graphics card, some of the other GPUs in the lineup have been decidedly underwhelming.
In particular, the GeForce RTX 4080 Super price is $999, which might not be a bargain, but it’s a much better deal than the $1,199 launch price of the original GeForce RTX 4080, and it even has a better spec. Nvidia hasn’t officially revealed the full specs of the new GeForce RTX 4080 Super, but says it has ‘more cores’ and ‘faster memory’ than the original RTX 4080. That’s not bad considering it costs $200 less, and also has a healthy 16GB of GDDR6X memory allocated to it.
According to Nvidia, the RTX 4080 Super now has a memory bandwidth of 736GB/s, compared with 716GB/s on the original RTX 4080. The company also says the RTX 4080 Super has the equivalent power of two GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cards. The GeForce RTX 4080 Super release date is Wednesday, January 31, 2024.
Interestingly, Nvidia also seems to have (wisely) removed the original RTX 4080 from its roster of current GPUs, and has also only compared the RTX 4080 Super’s specs with its last-gen GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super. It’s as if it’s trying to deny all knowledge of the original RTX 4080 ever existing, which is probably wise.
Next up, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super price is $799, and again Nvidia promises more cores and memory than the original RTX 4070 Ti, but doesn’t go into specifics. As with the RTX 4080, the original RTX 4070 Ti has also now been removed from the lineup.
Importantly, Nvidia notes that the RTX 4070 Ti Super has 16GB of GDDR6X memory, compared to 12GB on the standard RTX 4070 Ti, and that the RTX 4070 Ti Super has 672GB/s of memory bandwidth – a big step up from the 504GB/s of the vanilla RTX 4070 Ti. This means the RTX 4070 Ti Super is very likely to have a 256-bit memory interface, unlike the 192-bit bus on the standard RTX 4070 Ti. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super release date is Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
Finally, the GeForce RTX 4070 Super price is $599, which places it in the same price bracket as the original RTX 4070, but Nvidia says the new Super model has 20 percent more cores. This means the RTX 4070 Super has 7,168 CUDA cores, compared with the 5,888 of the RTX 4070. That’s a big leap in spec, which should see the RTX 4070 Super leapfrog the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT.
The RTX 4070 Super has the same 12GB of GDDR6X memory as its predecessor, though, which has now officially dropped in price to $549. The GeForce RTX 4070 Super release date is Wednesday, January 17, 2024.
It’s great to see the Nvidia Ada lineup finally living up to its potential, after the disappointment of the last year. While the GeForce RTX 4090 blew us away with its awesome 4K gaming power, both the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti had bafflingly high prices for the specs and performance on offer.
These new Super GPUs might not be cheap, but they’re a welcome breath of fresh air after years of overpriced GPUs with underwhelming specs. We’re looking forward to benchmarking all three GPUs when they come out, so watch this space.
Make sure you also read the rest of our CES 2024 coverage, including hands-on experiences coming live from the show floor in Las Vegas.