Today, NVIDIA announced their latest generation of graphic cards coming out over the next two months. During the September 2022 keynote presentation with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, the new graphic cards were demonstrated along with in-depth descriptions of how the new tech will work.
The latest generation of NVIDIA graphic cards is the RTX 4090, which will be coming out on October 12, 2022. NVIDIA claims that this card will be able to run Microsoft Flight Simulator, a game with a reputation for being aesthetically pleasing but heavy on loading times, “two to four times the speed of the highest tier 3090 card.” The RTX 4090 will likely cost $1,599 retail when it comes out. The RTX 4080 card will be released in November, with the option to buy the 16GB GDDR6X for $1,199 or the 12GB GDDR6X for $899.
Like Huang said, updating the RTX graphic cards is a full-stack project, and all of this is made possible by the DLSS 3 being incorporated into the Ada Lovelace architecture. The NVIDIA Ada Lovelace is the newest generation of GPU architecture that utilizes the Deep Learning Super Sampling tech to create a powerful, and super fast, performance. DLSS 3 is able to use the addition of Optical Multi Frame Generation to predict new frames, not just pixels.
Let’s take a second to understand what that means. With the DLSS 2, the AI would take a current, low-resolution frame and a high-resolution previous frame to predict a high-resolution current frame pixel by pixel. It looked great, at 62 FPS (frames per second), but it still took time to process.
With the DLSS 3, the AI compares the current and previous frames and learns how the scene is changing. Using direction and velocity of pixels, geometry, and frame pairs are “fed into a neural network that generates the intermediate frames.” By predicting frames instead of pixels without involving the game in the process, the DLSS 3 boosts “game performance by four times over brute-force rendering.” And the frame rate jumps from 62 FPS to 101 FPS. According to NVIDIA, because this process is done without involving the game pixel by pixel, even if your computer’s CPU can’t handle big games the frame rates would still be boosted by NVIDIA GeForce RTX tech.
The footage comparisons for Microsoft Flight Simulator were impressive, and Huang describes the game as “silky smooth” while using DSLL 3. There are currently 35 other games that will be compatible with the new RTX tech when it comes out. On the list are A Plague Tale: Requiem, Atomic Heart, Deliver Us Mars, Hogwarts Legacy, and so many more! Besides the games themselves, the new tech will be coming to Unity and Unreal Engine as well. Huang says the future of gaming is simulation, and his presentation was pretty convincing.
