Nvidia RTX 4080 and other next-gen Lovelace GPUs could launch sooner than you think

Nvidia geforce rtx 3050
(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia’s Lovelace graphics cards have been spotted in HWiNFO, suggesting that these next-gen products – expected later this year – are maybe inching closer to release (and backing up another recent rumor in that respect – more on that later).

Tom’s Hardware reports that a beta version (v7.21, build 4725) of system monitoring utility HWiNFO mentions support for five Lovelace GPUs (along with a couple of Hopper, Pro-targeted models, and possibly future Blackwell cards – that’s the theoretical successor to Hopper, so again, not consumer graphics products).

For Lovelace, which should be the RTX 4000 series – unless Nvidia makes a radical departure from its current naming convention – the following GPUs are listed: AD102, AD103, AD104, AD106, and AD107.

Going by the current thinking from the rumor mill – and of course, this is just speculation (all of this is, for that matter) – AD102 would be the chip in Nvidia’s RTX 4090 flagship and RTX 4080 (and Ti), with AD103 driving the RTX 4070, and AD104 being the engine of the mid-range products, with the budget cards using the chips below that.


Analysis: Nvidia Lovelace might beat AMD RDNA 3 to the punch?

As we noted at the outset, this sighting of Lovelace graphics cards could indicate that maybe we’re getting closer to their launch. The exciting thing about this possibility is that it tallies with another rumor which popped up a few days back, namely that Nvidia could be on track to beat AMD with the release of its next-gen GPUs.

In other words, Team Green is looking like it could get a head-start with RTX 4000 products hitting shelves before RX 7000 (RDNA 3) cards, and the appearance of GPU support within this hardware utility adds a little more weight to that suggestion.

That said, this is obviously another rather tenuous strand of speculation, and we definitely shouldn’t get carried away with this idea. Another possibility regarding this leak is that HWiNFO is just slotting in these Lovelace GPUs as placeholders based on the recent info spilled via the Nvidia hack (that’s plausible, for sure).

Both next-gen families from Nvidia and AMD are expected to achieve big things, though the latest we’ve heard is that Team Red could have really nailed a double blow in terms of not just major performance gains, but also capacious strides on the efficiency front (as ever, add your own salt, and a ton of it – though better efficiency from AMD wouldn’t be a surprise, of course).

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).