Nvidia’s RTX 40 SUPER series of graphics cards are real – and they’re out this month

Hardware company Nvidia has announced its latest PC graphics cards, revealing a mid-generation refresh to the existing generation of ray tracing focused and AI-enhanced GPUs.

There were three new graphics cards releases revealed today at part of 2024’s CES technology convention in Las Vegas, all bearing the ‘SUPER’ moniker that Nvidia has used a couple of times before.

They are the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, the 4070 Ti SUPER, and the 4070 SUPER.

If you’re wondering how that slots into the existing range, this is how it now shakes out:

• The top end card remains the $1599 RTX 4090.
• RTX 4080 SUPER comes in at $999 - that’s $200 cheaper than the previous 4080 was. The original 4080 is to be discontinued.
• RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is aimed at 1440p gaming, but will likely have at least a little 4K upside. It’s priced at $799. The existing 4070, which previously had the same RRP, will be discontinued.
• RTX 4070 SUPER retails for $599, and continues to target 1440p.
• RTX 4070 vanilla remains on the market, but gets a $50 price cut down to $549.
• The entry level to get RTX features on a more basic card remains unchanged, with the $299 RTX 4060 and the $399 RTX 4060 Ti.

The original 40 series cards were widely criticized for their value – with the jump in price from the previous generation not exactly matching the leap in performance. With the SUPER cards, Nvidia is determined to address those criticisms - mostly through a performance increase with prices remaining the same, but in one instance also retaining a price cut.

Nvidia admits, however, that these cards aren’t really a hot upgrade for those already with a 40 series RTX GPU. Instead, these are intended to be the new gold standard for upgrading from 20 or 30 series cards, replacing generations that made their debut in 2020 and 2018 respectively.

Much of this intention is borne out in Nvidia’s in-house comparisons. Comparing a 4080 SUPER to a 3080 Ti, for instance, you see a significant leap: Triple the Tensor Cores, significantly more memory, less power draw, and so on. Those sorts of comparisons continue right down the range - the 4070 Ti SUPER to the 3070 Ti, and the 4070 SUPER to the vanilla 3070.

In-game, there’s a significant uptick too, at least according to Nvidia’s own metrics – with or without Nvidia’s RTX ‘frame generation’ technology.

With Frame Generation, take something like Alan Wake 2 - which could barely scrape 30fps on an RTX 3070 Ti at 1440p, max settings, with DLSS and Ray Tracing Enabled. On the 4070 Ti SUPER, Nvidia boasts a frame rate in excess of 80fps. With the same setup, Cyberpunk 2077 jumps from a frame rate just shy of 40fps up to the 90fps range.

Without frame generation technology, there’s a similar leap - The Last of Us Part 1 jumps from around 75fps up to around 100fps on the 4070 Ti. These numbers come from Nvidia directly, and we recommend you wait for the media to test cards more widely before taking these numbers as absolute. But if this sort of uptick is indeed acquired at the same price and with lower power consumption, it’ll be at the very least a minor redemption for Nvidia after several of the existing 40 series GPUs left consumers cold.

The new cards will be released over the next month in a reverse power order. The 4070 SUPER lands on January 17, followed by the 4070 Ti SUPER on January 24, and finally by the 4080 SUPER on January 31. For those who don’t want to wait for reviews, pre-orders will start imminently.