In the never-ending struggle for dominance in the graphics card market, Nvidia has announced the return of super-charged desktop GPUs. These new Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards live up to their name, as they are super-charged replacements to existing Nvidia products with significantly more muscle and even more alluring prices.
These new Super RTX 40 series graphics cards are really at another point compared to Nvidia’s initial RTX 40 series offerings. More functionality is appreciated, but it’s not something you have to pay for. With those Super Cards, you get significant functionality is enhanced at no extra cost, making it a clear win for everyone except AMD.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is the star of this launch as it costs $999. This makes it $200 less expensive than the original Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and sets it up to compete with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which also costs $999. Without AMD’s price cut, it’s a fight Nvidia is likely to win. You can check out our AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX review for a better idea, but at $999, you’ll be hard to pass up the RTX 4080 Super.
The GeForce RTX 4080 Super also ships with a higher core count, slightly elevated clock speeds, and faster GDDR6X memory. The graphics card is still based on the same AD103 GPU die as the standard RTX 4080, but with the entire die enabled, giving it 10,240 CUDA cores to the RTX 4080’s 9,728. A modest bump of 5% that is matched with more texture mapping units (TMUs) and ray-tracing (RT) cores to boost performance across the board. Granted, a 5% boost isn’t huge but, coming with a price cut, what’s not to love?
With the other new Super graphics cards, we unfortunately don’t get any price drops, but the innovations in functionality are almost as dramatic and increase the value. When it launched, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti used a fully enabled AD104 GPU chip, but its replacement, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, will use the AD103 GPU chip that forms the backbone of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super.
This brings the new RTX 4070 Ti Su consistent to the RTX 4080 compared to the unsupported Su with 4070 Ti, and that’s indeed what we’re seeing. You’ll get a 10% increase in the number of CUDA cores. from 7,680 to 8,448, and even larger adjustments elsewhere. The number of raster or momentum-matched (ROP) on the 4070 Ti Suconsistent is 40% higher than that of its non-Suconsistent variant, and its reminiscence formula has also taken a significant step forward.
Not only will the RTX 4070 Ti Super come with faster GDDR6X memory, but it will also have 16GB of RAM instead of the 12GB found on the RTX 4070 Ti. Best of all, the memory interface is now 256-bit wide, giving the card a massive accumulation of bandwidth. Between faster RAM and a wider interface, the RTX 4070 Ti Super has about 33% more memory bandwidth than its predecessor. And all of these innovations come at no extra cost: the RTX 4070 Ti Super is priced at $799, just like the RTX 4070 Ti when it launched.
With the non-Ti Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, we don’t see as many changes. The RTX 4070 Super doesn’t get faster GDDR6X memory or an increase in memory capacity. Instead, its updates are the simplest with a buildup of around 22% across all shading resources. Still, it’s a significant increase and, as with the RTX 4070 Ti Super, it comes at no additional cost.
Nvidia has no plans to take the original GeForce RTX 4070 off the market, but has instead reduced its price from $599 to $549. That leaves open the $599 value for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, with a price difference so slight that it will be much harder to introduce the non-Super RTX 4070 without load cuts. It’s simply completely overshadowed by the RTX 4070 Super, which will in fact be much faster.
The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series Super graphics cards are expected to be tested in the coming weeks. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is scheduled to launch on January 31, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super arrives on January 24, and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 on January 17.
After launch, the non-super Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will be retired as they have been replaced. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 (not Ti) will still stay on the market for a while, but as I said, without additional price cuts, it will sell a lot. Stay tuned for full reviews of all these new supercharged GPUs in the coming weeks.
For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed everything related to technology, driven, in part, by my love of gaming. I started running on my family and friends’ computers when I was about 10 years old. I have strived to be as informed as possible on all things PC, allowing me to have a complete understanding of everything related to the current generation. In my role at PCMag, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to share what I know.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed all things tech, driven, in part, by my love of gaming. I started running on my family and friends’ computers when I was about 10 years old. I’ve strived to be as informed as possible about all things PC, allowing me to have a complete understanding of all things current-gen. In my role at PCMag, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to share the percentage of what I know.
I wrote for the well-known tech site Tom’s Hardware for three years before I joined PCMag in 2018. In that time, I’ve reviewed desktops, PC cases, and motherboards as a freelancer, while also producing deals content for the site and its sibling ExtremeTech. Now, as a full-time PCMag analyst, I’m focusing on reviewing processors and graphics cards while dabbling in all other things PC-related.