Nvidia’s new flagship may offer a huge 4K gaming boost

Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 40-series of graphics cards is drawing closer, and as we’re getting there, more benchmarks and speculation about their performance is emerging. Today, we’re getting something completely new — the full AD102 GPU in a gaming setting. According to this new leak, the alleged Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti is going to be a 4K gaming beast, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Of course, there’s a catch — the card’s monstrous power requirements are becoming more and more apparent.

3090 in Control with the same settings does 72 FPS on Avg so 2.2x gain pic.twitter.com/UdK2kCEXhO — Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) July 19, 2022

Today’s rumor pertains to the full AD102 GPU, which is going to be the new flagship of the RTX 40-series lineup when it launches later this year. Keep in mind that this doesn’t pertain to the alleged RTX 4090, but rather a supercharged version of that card — think something like the current-gen RTX 3090 Ti, but much better.

It’s still unclear whether Nvidia will name the new GPU RTX 4090 Ti or if it will make a new Titan card, but one thing is certain — such a graphics card will feature the full AD102 GPU. The chip is rumored to come with as many as 18,432 CUDA cores, marking a 12.5% improvement over the RTX 4090. According to Twitter leaker XpeaGPU, the full AD102 is going to be one beefy GPU with performance worthy of the best graphics cards.

At a “high power draw” setting, the AD102 managed to hit 160 frames per second (fps) in Control when played at 4K resolution. This is with both ray tracing and DLSS enabled, so it’s an impressive score. As noted by Wccftech’s Hassan Mujtaba, the RTX 3090 averages around 72 fps.

This implies that the full AD102 GPU might deliver twice the performance of the RTX 3090.

Fans on the Nvidia RTX 3080. Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Although such a performance gain seems excessive, this claim falls in line with previous rumors that also said that the graphics card may double the performance of its predecessor. On the other hand, there’s a lot we don’t know about these gaming results, such as the exact game settings or whether the new Ada GPU comes equipped with next-gen Tensor cores. The leaker also didn’t reveal the clock speed or the TDP of the card.

Even if this kind of performance proves to be real and sustainable, there’s a big catch that we’ve talked about many times — the card’s power draw. The performance of the AD102 GPU shows that we really might be seeing power consumption as high as 800 watts, which would certainly require one of the latest power supply units (PSU) in order to run. Take the above with a healthy dose of skepticism.

There’s still a while until the rumored release date of these GPUs, and nothing is certain until Nvidia speaks up.

The latest leaks suggest that Nvidia’s RTX 40-series might launch in October.