If history is any indication, Nvidia is known to launch a new generation of GPUs every two years – 20 Series came in 2018, 30 Series in 2020 and now, we are expecting the 40 Series of graphics cards in the fall of 2022, just in time for the holiday spirit to kick in. Retailers like Newegg and the EVGA store are aggressively clearing their stock of the existing 20 and 30 Series cards by reducing the prices, with many models like the RTX 3080 on sale. This can only mean one thing – that a 40 Series launch is imminent.
Most PC enthusiasts will likely jump on to the hype train and buy a 40 Series at launch, but if you’ve already invested in a high-end 20 or 30 Series card like the RTX 3080Ti or if you are in the market for a 30 Series card as of this moment, should you wait for the 40 Series? While answering this may not be simple, according to recent speculations and leaks, here are two reasons why you should wait and two reasons why you should not:
Reasons to wait
1) More CUDA Cores = More Performance
The high-end 40 Series card is expected to come with upwards of a whopping 18,000 CUDA cores, compared to 10,752 of the RTX 3090. This is bound to generate significant performance gains.
2) Shift to PCIe 5.0
What does this mean in real life? Well, you can expect double the performance of PCIe 4.0, which by all means, is quite impressive.
Reasons not to wait for the 40 Series:
1) High TDPs for the upcoming GPUs
Thermal design power or TDP is the basic indicator of power consumption of a particular component. With that said, as the new GPUs get more powerful, the power consumption also increases. The high-end 40 Series card, rumored to be named RTX 4090 is going to be quite power hungry with 700-800W power consumption. This is bound to render power supplies in most current builds obsolete.
2) Scarce availibilty
GPUs have been in short supply lately, thanks to the global semiconductor shortage. The situation has gotten drastically better, but this isn’t any indication that the availibilty of the 40 Series will be plenty at launch. Scalpers are expected to intervene and then sell later at extorbitant rates. So, it just might be a better option to go for a discounted 30 Series card instead.
If you are still on the fence on whether to upgrade to the 40 Series or not, the official launch will clear things out when the retail pricing and the price-to-performance ratio comes out in the clear.
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