At long last, the GeForce RTX 40-series has been revealed, but in true Nvidia fashion, CEO Jensen Huang didn’t delve deeply into raw speeds and feeds while introducing the RTX 4090 and 4080 during his GTC keynote. Heck, Huang barely even talked about gaming performance. Fortunately, Nvidia’s website includes key technical details lacking from the presentation—details that confirm several deeply interesting tidbits about these new “Ada Lovelace” GPU-powered graphics cards.
Here are six must-know GeForce RTX 40-series details that you didn’t hear during Jensen’s reveal. For the full scoop on Nvidia’s new graphics cards, check out our coverage of the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 announcement.
One name, two very different RTX 4080s
Nvidia
In a deeply anti-consumer move, Nvidia is rolling out a pair of GeForce RTX 4080 offerings, ostensibly differing in memory capacity. Nvidia simply gave them “16GB RTX 4080” and “12GB RTX 4080” names, after all. But while Huang failed to mention it, these two “4080s” will offer incredibly different baseline performance as well.
As you can see in the chart above, the 12GB GeForce RTX 4080 doesn’t just have less memory, it also has a much narrower 192-bit bus, and a whopping 21 percent fewer CUDA cores. That means it will be significantly slower than the 16GB model, more often than not. Calling these two very dissimilar GPUs by the same name is sure to cause confusion amongst graphics card buyers.
The 12GB RTX 4080 might not have a Founders Edition model
Custom RTX 40-series cards look quite thick indeed, and will likely be the only option for 12GB GeForce RTX 4080 models.
Nvidia
Speaking of, scrolling through the spec sheet for the RTX 4080 revealed this interesting additional tidbit. While the 16GB GeForce RTX 4080 includes specific length, width, and slot measurements for Nvidia’s Founders Edition version, the 12GB GeForce RTX 4080 simply says “varies by manufacturer.” It doesn’t sound like the 12GB model will get Nvidia’s own custom Founders Edition treatment. (That sound you hear is the ghost of EVGA screaming).
GeForce RTX 40-series supports AV1 encode
Nvidia
AV1 encode is the holy grail for media creators, offering much better visuals at much lower bandwidth needs. Intel beat AMD and Nvidia to the punch by including killer AV1 encoding in its Arc graphics cards, but the footnotes of Nvidia’s RTX 4090 and 4080 spec sheets reveal that Team Green will support AV1 encode this generation as well (AV1 decode was already supported).
“GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards feature two of our new eighth-generation NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC), now with support for AV1 encoding, enabling a raft of new possibilities for livestreamers, video editors and video callers,” the RTX 40-series announcement post crowed.
You read that right—not one, but two NVENC encoders with AV1 encode support in RTX 40-series graphics cards. Streamers, take note.
DLSS 3 isn’t coming to older GPUs
It’s obvious that last-generation GPUs won’t include new-gen hardware encoders. But Nvidia’s much-hyped DLSS 3 software feature isn’t coming to RTX 20- and 30-series cards either, even though DLSS 2.0 and 2.1 were backported to both. Nvidia’s GPU generation comparison page lists DLSS 3 on the RTX 40-series only while older-gen RTX offerings remain listed with DLSS 2.0.
Nvidia
Nvidia confirmed that DLSS 3 won’t be backwards compatible in a statement to The Verge. “DLSS 3 is powered by the new fourth-gen Tensor Cores and Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40-Series GPUs,” and thus won’t be coming to older RTX generations, Nvidia spokesperson Benjamin Berraondo told the site.
NVLink is dead to GeForce
Nvidia’s SLI technology for multi-GPU setups has been dead for a while now, but the “NVLink” tech that supplanted it remained in last-generation’s RTX 3090 GPUs. No more. The spec pages for the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080s explicitly say that NVLink is not supported this generation. Pour one out.
That’s it for these buried treasures. We’re sure to learn even more about the GeForce RTX 40-series in the coming days and weeks, but once again, for the full scoop on Nvidia’s new graphics cards, check out our coverage of the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 announcement.
Author: Brad Chacos, Executive editor
Brad Chacos spends his days digging through desktop PCs and tweeting too much. He specializes in graphics cards and gaming, but covers everything from security to Windows tips and all manner of PC hardware.