Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards celebrated their first birthday in September, but even after a year of production, they are not getting any easier to find: finding a place to buy stock of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is nearly impossible, and more advanced The same is true for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, which are priced at least twice the list price on eBay and elsewhere.

The GeForce RTX 30 glut is unlikely to be resolved before the card is no longer a top-end Nvidia GPU; on Twitter, RetiredEngineer reported that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs are set to arrive in 2022 to arrive in 2022, shared a paid article from DigiTimes reporting that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs are set to arrive in 2022.

While far from officially confirmed, it has been suggested that the next generation GeForce cards will use a 5-nanometer process manufactured by TSMC (an advancement of the 8nm Samsung chips used in the current generation of Ampere generation cards).

According to what Wccftech calls a "reliable leaker," the new hardware certainly packs a punch: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 flagship chip features the Ada Lovelace AD102, with 18,432 CUDA cores, Clock speeds as high as 2.5 GHz, and there is talk of 92 teraflops of compute performance.

For comparison, the current Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 card (theoretically priced at $1,499, but expected to double that due to a shortage) has 10,752 CUDA cores, a 1.6GHz clock speed, and about 37 teraflops of computing power.

If the leaked specs are correct (which is a big "if"), this would mean a performance increase of about 150%. Of course, actual in-game performance is something else, and would actually be about a 50% improvement. This is certainly noticeable, but not as big an improvement as the specs suggest is possible.

Given these leaks, it is possible that the next generation GeForce RTX GPUs are further along in development than we had anticipated. There was a gap of years of traction between the current Ampere-based GeForce GPUs and their predecessors, the Turing GPUs. However, if Nvidia is ready to launch the GeForce RTX 40 series in 2022, it could be introducing a new GPU architecture every year. [The global chip shortage is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. And while the supply shortage is thanks in part to a blend of increased demand and severe supply chain disruption due to the coronavirus outbreak, the ability of GeForce RTX GPUs to effectively mine cryptocurrency makes them particularly attractive.

So far, Nvidia's attempts to weaken the cryptocurrency mining capabilities of GeForce RTX cards have been fairly ineffective and easily sidestepped; if Nvidia does not take further steps and cryptocurrency prices continue to soar, the GeForce RTX 40, may become as difficult to obtain as the current GeForce RTX 30 cards.