GeForce RTX 40 Ada Lovelace Could Bring Huge Generational Performance Leap For Gamers
It has been a painful year for gamers in need of a GPU upgrade, because graphics cards have been especially hard to find (unless you're willing to pay grossly inflated prices from scalpers). There is some potentially good news, however. We could have access to next-generation graphics cards by the time the market normalizes, and multiple rumors point to some beastly upgrades.
As it pertains to NVIDIA, we're starting to hear more about Ada Lovelace in the leaks and rumors scene. While nothing is official, the latest chatter is that Ada Lovelace could bring about the same kind of generational performance leap that we saw when going from Maxwell to Pascal. If that is the case, the GeForce RTX 40 series will be a mighty lineup.
The performance claim comes from Twitter user Ulysses (@TtLexington), who says going from the GeForce RTX 30 series (Ampere) to the GeForce RTX 40 series (Ada Lovelace) will be like going from the GeForce GTX 750/750 Ti and 900 series (Maxwell) to the GeForce RTX 10 series (Pascal).
That is notable, because the leap in performance from Maxwell to Pascal was pretty significant for the time. In fact, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti still holds up as a high performance graphics card for rasterized rendering (real-time ray tracing will bring the card to its knees, but otherwise it can still crank high some high frame rates).
Looking at some recent rumors, Ada Lovelace will be manufactured on TSMC's 5-nanometer node. It will culminate in the AD102 GPU, which is said to have a die size of around 600mm2 (just a bit smaller than the 628mm2 of the GA102), with up to 18,423 CUDA cores in the flagship GeForce RTX 4090.
For comparison, the current generation GeForce RTX 3090 (Ampere) sports 10,496 CUDA cores, so that is quite the jump with Ada Lovelace. It's also rumored to be a power hungry part, with TDPs in the 420-450W range at the high end.
According to Ulysses, the GeForce RTX 40 series is bound for a debut in the first quarter of 2023 debut, rather than in late 2022. This is notable, because multiple chip makers have said that the silicon shortage could linger throughout next year. So hopefully when Ada Lovelace arrives, graphics cards will actually be obtainable (at MSRP).
Meanwhile, AMD recently said it is on track to bring its RDNA 3 architecture to market next year. And unofficially, Navi 31 (based on RDNA 3) is said to offer up to a whopping 15,360 cores. That is more than three times as many as found in the Radeon RX 6900 XT (5,120 stream processors).
If the rumors all end up being right, next-gen cards from AMD and NVIDIA are going to be absolute monsters. They might also be power-thirsty cards, but if they deliver the kind of massive performance upticks that leaks and rumors suggest, gamers may not care all that much. Here's hoping we'll actually be able to buy them.
