It’s kind of remarkable how little we really know about Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 40 series gaming graphics cards. AMD is openly working on next-generation GPUs based on RDNA 3, Radeon and Intel are gearing up for the launch of full of their Arc Alchemist cards before the end of the summer – yet there hasn’t been so much as a single presentation slide on Nvidia’s products. Not the kind of hype you’d expect, given how many of the best current-gen graphics cards have GeForce badges.
Arriving to fill that information gap are, inevitably, leaks. If you don’t hang out regularly in PC hardware circles, know that there is a veritable industry of insider houses: anonymous but widely known consultants like. Greymon55 AND copy7chemistry, who have shared enough accurate details about previous GPU and CPU releases that at least some of their sources are stable. Recently, unannounced Nvidia cards like the RTX 4070, RTX 4080, and especially the RTX 4090 have become the industry’s hottest products, which means that leakers are also the main source of GeForce details for the gaming tech world at large. .
I’m not here to stifle leaks. Leaks can be fun, and leaks can be accurate, and sometimes they’re both. But between the excitement of getting a look at the next technology and the feeling that you may have beaten the corporate PR machine, a diet consisting only of Twitter tips can blind us to their limitations as a source of information.
The increase in RTX 40 leaks might actually be the most perfect example I’ve seen of this because, by the discoverers’ own admissions, most of the significant details on these graphics cards are in flux. They are still in development and almost everything we as PC owners would like to know about them is subject to change. Unless it’s actively changing as we speak.
Again, some detectors have good records, so I don’t believe copy7kim was knowingly telling porkies about The reveal of the RTX 4090 will take place in mid-July. But it clearly didn’t, so either that information was out of date at the time, or the discovery window was just an opening to begin with. Another apparent insider, wjm47196, recently claimed an October release date for the RTX 4090 (the AD102 mentioned is its core GPU). But again, even if this is a sincere belief, it can just as easily be based on outdated, incomplete, or simply temporary plans.
Sometimes it’s not even unconfirmed details, but hardware or software that can’t be finalized. Performance-based and benchmark-based leaks are best of all, but as far as the RTX 40 series goes, they’ll be running on drivers that aren’t even close to being ready for launch day. So when someone says The RTX 4090 scores almost twice as much as the RTX 3090 in 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme test, or it can reach 160fps+ in Control at 4K… I mean, it sounds great, but it’s not really going to reflect the performance that PC gamers will see at home. So how useful are these reports, beyond the self-evident finding that a new GPU will be faster than the old one?
Again, there is no evidence to suggest a deliberate spread of misinformation, and my belief is that independent tip providers are just as vital to the gaming/tech fabric as conventional reporting. But right now, with the RTX 40 series in particular, there just isn’t much truth to tell – just maybes and probabilities, waiting to merge into actual products.
I understand why this is frustrating, partly because leaks are the only regular source everything to do with one of the biggest PC hardware developments of the next year. That’s another matter, really: unlike gaming, where hype builds but can’t be acted upon until release day, there are undoubtedly people out there currently deciding whether to upgrade their GPU now or wait for the next generation of Nvidia. Specs, performance and release date information are important to real buying decisions right now, so while there’s a lot of pre-release interest in leaked data, that’s all the more reason to be wary of potential inaccuracies.
Is there anything really compelling to come out of these early leaks of the RTX 40 series? Perhaps a detail, and not a small one: copy7chemistry, Greymon55, and wjm47196 have all reported that the RTX 4090 will launch first and separately, with the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 following later. Greymon55 and wjm47196 have also said that the RTX 4090 release will happen this year, with the other two cards (both based on different core processors) coming in 2023. It still looks like that could change, but just don’t match smoke flows like this without any real fire.
Beyond that, Nvidia’s upcoming RTX GPUs remain a mystery. The mystery will, of course, invite rumours, and rightly so these should become more detailed and accurate as the cards themselves are finalised. In the meantime, though, remember that a look behind the scenes will rarely tell the whole story.
