It’s hard to believe that Nvidia’s RTX 3000 graphics cards launched just over a year ago, and perhaps harder still to see that the company’s GPUs are finding their way into gaming PCs faster than the previous generation, despite well-documented market factors. Chip shortages and cryptocurrency booms be damned, though, as rumours point to team green preparing to launch its lineup of RTX 4000 cards in 2022, with recent reports suggesting they could provide up to double the performance of the RTX 3000 series, at a cost.
Hardware leaker Greymon55 took to Twitter to say, “Double performance, double power consumption, can you accept it?” A follow-up tweet confirmed that they were talking about Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4000 series, codenamed ‘Ada Lovelace.’
While generational performance increases are to be expected, the TDP (thermal design point) of Nvidia graphics cards has only increased over the past seven years. The RTX 3080 has a TDP rating of 320W and recommends a 700W PSU, meaning that the RTX 4080 may draw up to 640W and require an even larger, more expensive, power supply.
The RTX 4000 GPUs will likely come equipped with the new PCIe Gen 5 power connector, which can deliver up to 600W via a single cable. Although they may not be the first products from Nvidia to sport the Gen 5 connector, rumours suggest that the tech company will release the refreshed RTX 3000 and RTX 2000 graphics cards in the coming months.
As with all rumours, you should take these claims with a grain of salt. While we’re excited to see new products from graphics card manufacturers that will likely dwarf today’s best graphics cards, we hope that power consumption can be kept in check as well. For reference, the 320W TDP of an RTX 3080 is almost double that of the GTX 1080’s 180W, with the last generational decrease in TDP being the GTX 980’s 165W from the GTX 780’s 250W.