New graphics cards, perhaps?
It’s a bit hard to believe, but the RTX 4000 series of graphics cards is already one year old, which means it’s roughly half through its lifespan. We’re closer to the launch of possible RTX 5000 cards, but not quite there just yet, so NVIDIA has something planned in the meantime. NVIDIA has announced a hardware event for January, where it’ll most likely announce new mid-gen GPU refreshes.
NVIDIA has announced a hardware event to take place on January 8th, 2024, at 11 AM ET. The event invite is pretty non-specific about what we’ll see during the event, but we know that it’ll take place in the middle of CES 2024, where other companies will also be looking to stand out as well. As for what the company will announce, rumors over the past few days have said that NVIDIA is planning to release new “Super” variants of RTX 4000 GPUs, including the RTX 4080 Super and potentially other Super variants. The last time we’ve seen NVIDIA launch Super variants of its GPUs was in 2019, when the company launched its RTX 2000 Super range—RTX 3000 Super cards were rumored but ultimately not released. It’s been a long time since then.
As for what can you expect from these potential new GPUs, they will probably be supercharged variants of the cards that are already on store shelves. That can mean anything from more VRAM to a higher memory bus, or even higher clock speeds or more CUDA cores. There’s no way of knowing for sure until the cards are released, though. This will likely also set the stage for the upcoming RTX 5000 graphics cards, allegedly codenamed “Ada Lovelace Next” or “Blackwell,” which might be launched in late 2024 or early 2025.
If you have yet to buy an RTX 4000 GPU, it probably won’t do you any harm to wait a couple of months until CES 2024 rolls around to see if these new GPUs are worth your money over the ones currently on store shelves. The old ones won’t suddenly go bad, but why not get something better if possible?
Source: The Verge