Now that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is official following Nvidia's big CES 2024 announcement, all eyes are on the end of January 2024 as Nvidia releases what may be its final graphics card of the Nvidia Lovelace generation.
With the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super launching ahead of it, this is Nvidia's last chance to really redeem the Nvidia RTX 4080, which by rights should have been a major contender for the best graphics card of 2024 were it not for its terrible pricing at launch.
Still, as one of the best 4K graphics cards on the market, the RTX 4080 has a lot going for it specs wise, and considering that the RTX 4080 Super is set to have even better specs at a much better price, the RTX 4080 Super is well positioned to be something of a comeback story for Team Green as it closes out the Lovelace generation. We'll have to see once the reviews are in, but there's no harm in speculating recklessly about what we expect to see from this might GPU at the end of January.
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super: Cut to the chase
- What is it? Nvidia's next (and possibly last) premium-tier graphics card of this generation
- When will it be available? It will launch on January 31, 2024
- What will it cost? US MSRP starting at $999 (about £800/AU$1,400)
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super: Release date
The Nvidia RTX 4080 Super launches on January 31, 2024, following up the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super the week prior.
It is also likely to be the last Nvidia graphics card release for the rest of 2024, unless Nvidia Blackwell and the Nvidia 5000-series makes an appearance towards the end of the year. We'll certainly be keeping an eye on any developments in that direction, but as far as Nvidia Lovelace is concerned, this is almost certainly the last hurrah.
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super: Price
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super will have a US MSRP of $999.99 (about £800/AU$1,400), which is $200 less than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 that this card supercedes, and finally fixes the biggest problem we had with the RTX 4080. Given its price, it is very hard to recommend the RTX 4080 as is, not with the RTX 4090 so close in price with substantially better performance.
The RTX 4080 Super is also going to be squaring off against Team Red's flagship GPU, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX at the same price point, so watching these two cards fight it out is going to be a lot of fun.
Also, given that the RTX 4080 Super will have a Founders Edition, this should help keep the price of third-party cards much closer to MSRP than they would otherwise be, something that should help sales of the 4080 Super after the lackluster performance of the RTX 4080.
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super: Specs & performance
Fortunately, we know a lot about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super thanks to Nvidia's CES announcement. While we don't have any official CUDA core counts, we do know that the 4080 Super will come with more compute units unlocked, possibly as many as 80, giving a CUDA core count of 10240, making it second only to the RTX 4090 in terms of raw power. This will also give it 80 ray tracing cores and 320 tensor cores for even better performance.
Nvidia also says that the GDDR6X memory in the RTX 4080 Super will be the fastest consumer graphics memory in the world, running at 23 Gbps, so this card will absolutely be able to chew through 4K gaming with ease. We also know that the RTX 4080 Super will have 736 GB/s of memory bandwidth, along with 64GB L2 cache. We don't know if it will have an expanded memory bus, but 256-bit seems likely based on everything else we know.
The card will also have the same 320W TGP as its predecessor, so some energy savings seem to have been made somewhere along the way.
Without benchmarking it ourselves, we can't say much about prospective performance, but given the specs and the otherwise very strong performance of the RTX 4080, we expect the RTX 4080 Super to get gamers much closer to RTX 4090 levels of performance, making it a very strong contender for the ultimate gaming enthusiast GPU when it launches at the end of the month.
