Nvidia really can't keep a secret, can they?" Yes, to no one's surprise, a new GeForce RTX 40 series supercard was announced at CES. A refresh of the Ada Lovelace architecture has long been rumored, but here we are, with the same sticker price and a little more performance, or in one particular case, a pretty significant drop.

The Green Team has announced three new Super cards, two of which will completely replace their non-Super predecessors, and the third will push the price of the older Ada sibling cards down. The RTX 4070 Super, the first to be released this month, is arguably the most interesting card from a pure silicon standpoint, with the biggest GPU upgrades that Nvidia estimates will deliver up to 20% performance gains.

From 5,888 CUDA cores on the original RTX 4070 AD104 GPU, it now has 7,168 clever little things. Looking at raw floating-point performance, it has changed from about 29 TFLOPS to 36 TFLOPS, but it must be said that the frame rate does not show that percentage increase. [However, the RTX 4070 Super only has a different GPU, not a different memory specification. In other words, the $599 card will be available on the 17th of this month, but the RTX 4070's MSRP will be reduced to $549. Nevertheless, it will still be sold resolutely below the $500 mark at retail.

But it is the RTX 4080 Super that may get the most attention, with a $200 price cut to $999 and a January 31 release date. It uses the full AD103 GPU and gets all 80 SMs and 10,240 CUDA cores offered by Big Boi Silicon.

Nevertheless, according to Nvidia's calculations, this is only a 5% increase in core count and would only result in a 1-2% increase in game frame rates. However, the RTX 4080 Super has 23 Gbps GDDR6X memory, so you get faster memory.

The boosted GPU and memory specs will not make those who have spent a fortune on the RTX 4080 in the past year or so turn pale with envy or regret their purchase. But the new price of $999 absolutely will. Finding an older RTX 4080 for less than MSRP is rare indeed, and we've only found one Prime members-only deal in the past 12 months that was priced on par with the new Super.

They now seem to be choking on smooth ray-traced frame rates.

The strange middle child, the RTX 4070 Ti Super, with its silly multi-suffix name, is the only one sitting on an entirely new GPU. now using the AD103 chip made famous by the RTX 4080, the RTX 4070 Ti Super has cores increased by exactly 10% from 7680 to 8448, which would equate to an average frame rate increase of about 10% or just slightly less.

If one really wanted to complicate the whole GPU family naming scheme, one could argue that it is the RTX 4080 LE.

This would only be helped by the fact that, being a larger GPU, it has a wider 256-bit aggregate memory bus and 16GB GDDR6X memory, but still runs at 21Gbps.

The card will completely replace the old RTX 4070 Ti and will be available on January 24 with the same $799 price tag as the original card.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.