Next generation Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPUs are reportedly coming in the next few months.

It’s been nearly two years since Nvidia introduced its Ampere GPU architecture in the GeForce RTX 3080, and the company is reportedly preparing to announce its replacement. Based on tweets from a usually reliable leaker, Tom’s Hardware reports that the RTX 4000 series and its Lovelace GPU architecture will start rolling out early in the third quarter of this year.

It’s been so hard to buy Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series GPUs for so long that it seems too early to talk about replacing them, even though there was a similar two-year gap between the first RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 GPUs. row. The difference is how long it took Ampere to seep into the bottom of the line. The Turing architecture debuted in September 2018, and by April 2019 it had reached the low end GeForce GTX 1650 models; the first Ampere cards appeared in September 2020, but for the GeForce RTX 3050, they did not appear until January 2022.

Other reports from the same source suggest that the RTX 4000 GPU could be a big advantage over the top RTX 3090 Ti, going from 84 Nvidia streaming multiprocessors (SMs) to somewhere between 126 and 140 SMs. The alleged RTX 4090 will ship with 24GB of GDDR6 RAM (the same amount as the RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti) and is said to roughly double the performance of the RTX 3090 at the same 450W. Whether any of these performance claims are true remains to be seen – Nvidia GPUs typically offer impressive performance jumps between generations, but doubling performance in the same power range would be an anomalously large jump, historically speaking.

We also don’t know how these GPUs will be priced, how easy they will be to obtain, or whether Nvidia will continue to manufacture and sell RTX 3000 series cards to meet GPU demand. The graphics card market is gradually returning to some semblance of “normality”after years of chip shortages, a cryptocurrency boom, and speculation-driven chaos that have driven up both MSRP and actual street prices for virtually every new and used GPU. I can buy.

Nvidia has also ramped up production of older GPUs such as the GTX 1050 Ti and 1650, as well as the RTX 2060, to meet demand during a shortage, and the company may continue this practice if 4000-series GPUs are in short supply.