Not only the controversy over the name of the two GeForce RTX 4080s, in his own community responses NVIDIA has addressed the issue of performance of the new cards compared to the previous generation and, in particular, the impact of the DLSS in the projections proposed in the keynote of the other evening.
To clarify, the company has examined a graph of those shown, noting that DLSS is active where available, but “there are a few games like Division 2 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla that don’t have DLSSso you can see the performance compared to the faster RTX 3000s without DLSS. “
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In AC Valhalla we see that the RTX 4080 12 GB is slightly below the RTX 3090 Ti, while in The Division 2 they are equivalent. The 16GB RTX 4080 appears to be around 20-25% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti in the two titles the RTX 4090 is above 50% in Valhalla and even further in The Division 2.
NVIDIA typically talks about a 2 to 4-fold jump, but takes DLSS into account. Also, when it talks about 4 times, it refers to the fact that future games coming up will have un ray tracing even more pushed and heavy, which will make DLSS indispensable or almost. It will be there that the third generation of the technology, capable of quadrupling the performance compared to native rendering, will make the difference.
Finally, speaking of creative applications with CUDA support, NVIDIA explains that the leap in operating frequencies over the previous generation can improve shader performance by 30/120% depending on the scenario. In addition, NVIDIA has increased the L2 cache in the GPUs and this aspect will also help the new cards.
“For the workflows of the creatorthe GeForce RTX 40 series is up to 2x faster in offline rendering apps – like Blender or V-Ray and, together with DLSS 3, is up to 4x faster in real-time rendering apps like Omniverse, Unreal or Unity. All with a similar or lower consumption than the previous generation “.
Hardware enthusiasts, us first of all, will have to change their perspective a little when evaluating the upcoming video cards because upscaling technologies will become more and more prevalent and widespread. Looking only at the performance of the shaders could therefore be limiting, even if the new range of NVIDIA takes a significant step forward.