Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition Review

What Else is New?

Ada Lovelace SM

The new Ada Lovelace architecture has a lot of changes under the hood. The Streaming Multiprocessors have undergone a radical shake up. Compared to the Ampere version there is up to twice the performance and power efficiency. The Tensor cores that power the Nvidia AI have been updated from the third generation to the fourth. It doesn’t sound like much until you realise we’re now in the world of PetaFLOPS. Twice the performance the Ampere Tensor cores. The RT cores, ray tracing, are now in their third generation and promise up to twice the performance of the already market leading 2nd generation. In a similar way to the way that CPUs reordered instruction, the Ada Lovelace SMU has built in Shader Execution Reordering which can double ray tracing operations.

AV1 Encoder and Decoder

The encoding on the 3000 series of Nvidia graphics cards was already pretty handy thanks to the boost of NVENC. The Ada Lovelace 4000 series now has two AV1 encoders built in, which is 40% more efficient than the Ampere version and can split the workload across both, before recombining them into a single video stream, doubling your performance.

 

With streaming a massive part of the modern world, and the popular platforms having a bandwidth limitation beyond the capacity of your own internet line, the Ada Lovelace AV1 Codec leverages the Nvidia AI to vastly improve the image quality whilst maintaining the same bitrate. If you’ve ever watched a stream replete with artifacts, this could be the solution to all our woes. OBS and Discord are both releasing updated software that will make full use of this.

AI Denoise and Resize

Although the Ada Lovelace architecture has benefits to live 3D rendering, we think the following two images best show the potential of the new GPU for those of us who aren’t spending our lives in front of a Maya viewport. You might have experienced AI picture resizing and denoising with the many websites, but the technologies that underpin the latest Nvidia card promise to bring even sharper images to life. We can’t wait.