Ada Lovelace delivered massive efficiency improvments, but needed the framegen crutch to really "boost" performance
Everyone was looking forward to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards. After two horribly long years of shortages caused by cryptomining, along with the influenece of the Covid pandement, GPU prices and availability had finally started to settle down by the summer of 2022. Ethereum mining was dead, and rumors were that Nvidia was pulling out all the stops with its next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture. Smaller lithography courtesy of TSMC's cutting-edge 4N (4nm Nvidia) process node would leapfrog what AMD was planning. Everything seemed like it would be great.
When the RTX 4090 arrived on October 12, it made no excuses. It offered a substantial 50–75 percent performance improvement over the previous generation RTX 3090, only cost $100 more, and while the supply was definitely constrained, at least cryptominers weren't snapping up every GPU. The RTX 4080 followed a month later, on November 16, but by then things were turning sour. Nvidia had pre-announced the 4080 16GB and 4080 12GB variants, but the two cards had virtually nothing in common, and people were pissed. Also, prices were seemingly influenced by the cryptoboom, even though that had ended. $1,199 for the 4080 took the overpriced 3080 Ti's place, while the 4080 12GB was going to cost $899 while offering far less in the specs and performance departments.
Well, one thing lead to another and Nvidia axed the 4080 12GB name and changed that to the 4070 Ti — with a $100 price cut. But it was still clear that the rest of the RTX 40-series cards wouldn't quite manage to live up to the lofty results posted by the 4090. The 4080 was certainly faster than the 3080, by 50–70 percent, depending on the game and settings used. But it was also 70% more expensive than its predecessor. Alternatively, it was about 35% faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, which was still a pretty decent result.
