Surprised to see so many people recommending the 4080. I get its not a half bad card but the price its just insane, and its not even close to the 4090 in performance. Its an insult, and buying it only convinces nvidia 80 class cards at $1200 USD is acceptable.
Perhaps I'm still bitter about my 3070s exceedingly short life span. The 4080 definitely wont be that bad and 16gb is more than enough for this generation. But if you're going to spend $1200 on a gpu, I would personally say, get a 4090, get the full memory bus (4080 has the same bus as a 3060 ti) get the full bandwidth ( the 4080 has less bandwidth than a 3080) get the full cuda cores ( 4080 has less cores than a 3080 ti - though thats not completely fair since each core has more transistors, but still!).
The real improvement is in cache, which yes helps, but helps less and less the higher the resolution goes, and that includes ssaa and msaa. I think it was something like the 7900xtx is 3% faster than the 4080 at 1080p, 5% faster at 1440p and 7% faster at 4k. Those numbers might be not exactly right but you get the trend. And the 4080 is only where it starts. It gets even worse with 70 series, and completely goes off the rails with the 60 series.
7900xtx is a faster card for cheaper with 24gb of vram. The 7900xt is good too you can get it for something like $750 new with 20gb of vram. If you want dlss, or ray tracing, why not go with the 3090? They are cheap used on ebay if you can power them, we are talking $750 or less also with 24gb vram ( though the people saying not more than 16gb is needed now, are correct).
If you want the 40 series but don't want the 4090 I think the most balanced card is the 4070. Its decently priced now ($550 I think it was), it only has 12GB of vram but thats enough for now, and its not completely lopsided like the 4070 ti (12GB for performance like that, makes no sense) plus its also priced way too high and has significantly less bandwidth than the 2080 ti and the 3070 ti, and only marginally more than the 3060 ti. Thats going to hurt at high resolutions. Guess we'll just have to rely more on dlss so nvidia can move from selling hardware to selling software.
I'm a lifelong nvidia user. And even I am recommending amd for people who don't want the 4090. I would even pick the 6800xt, 6950xt or 7800xt over the 4070, whatever you can find for cheaper.
If you want 4k60 without upscaling, 4090 or 7900xtx are the way to go. If you don't mind some upscaling, there's a few other options, the ones I mentioned previously.
Anyway, sorry if I got a bit hyperbolic, not exactly sober and the 40 series right ticks me off.
Internet realities, eh...
