Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks before signing the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. (credit: Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images North America )

The Biden administration announced investments Friday totaling more than $5 billion in semiconductor research and development intended to re-establish the US as a global leader manufacturing the "next generation of semiconductor technologies."

Through sizeable investments, the US will "advance US leadership in semiconductor R&D, cut down on the time and cost of commercializing new technologies, bolster US national security, and connect and support workers in securing good semiconductor jobs," a White House press release said.

Currently, the US produces "less than 10 percent" of the global chips supply and "none of the most advanced chips," the White House said. But investing in programs like the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC)—considered the "centerpiece" of the CHIPS and Science Act's four R&D programs—and training a talented workforce could significantly increase US production of semiconductors that the Biden administration described as the "backbone of the modern economy."

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  PNY's version of the RTX 4080 Super. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Nvidia's new RTX 4080 Super is technically faster than the regular 4080 , but, by an order of magnitude, the most interesting thing about it is that, at its launch price of $999, it's $200 cheaper than the original 4080. I am going to write more after this sentence, but that's basically the review. You're welcome to keep reading, and I would appreciate it if you would, but truly there is only one number you need to know, and it is "$200."

All three of these Super cards—the 4070 Super , the 4070 Ti Super , and now the 4080 Super—are mild correctives for a GPU generation that has been more expensive than its predecessors and also, in relative terms, less of a performance boost. The difference is that where the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super try to earn their existing price tags by boosting performance, the 4080 Super focuses on lowering its price to be more in line with where its competition is.

Yes, it's marginally faster than the original 4080, but its best feature is a price drop from $1,199 to a still high, but more reasonable, $999. What it doesn't do is attempt to close the gap between the 4080 series and the 4090, a card that still significantly outruns any other consumer GPU that AMD or Nvidia offers. But if you have a big budget, want something that's still head-and-shoulders above the entire RTX 30-series, and don't want to deal with the 4090's currently inflated pricing, the 4080 Super is much more appealing than the regular 4080, even if it is basically the same GPU with a new name.

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  Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB."

It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers.

Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, " unlaunching " the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold.

Enlarge / A sample of the RTX Remix user interface being used to develop the enhanced Portal with RTX. (credit: Nvidia )

In the waning days of 2022, when Nvidia was preparing to release the impressive, ray tracing-enabled Portal with RTX , we were already looking toward a future when "the Nvidia RTX Remix modding platform used to remaster Portal will also be released to the general public at some point, making it easier to create updated versions of old DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with AI-upscaled textures and modern lighting effects," as we wrote at the time. That "at some point" future has fully arrived this week with Nvidia's open beta launch of its RTX Remix modding tools .

This isn't the wider modding community's first taste of RTX Remix's upscaling and lighting tools. Nvidia released an alpha version of the RTX runtime last April, offering "capture and replacement" modules that could upgrade older game assets and add modern graphical features like DLSS3 at playback. ModDB lists dozens of older games with an RTX.conf file that offers some level of RTX-powered graphical enhancement.

But this week's official open beta launch gives "experienced modders" new tools to easily create and insert these kinds of updated graphical effects and models in classic titles. That includes "generative AI texture tools" that Nvidia says use "our own proprietary model trained on our in-house dataset" to automatically upscale low-res textures to up to four times the original resolution. It also means the ability to add "physically accurate dynamic lights" that work with ray-tracing-capable hardware and a variety of open source models and material maps for modders to play with.

Enlarge / None of this would be necessary if it weren't for your inferior eyes, which retain the colors of pixels for fractions of a second longer than is optimal for shooting dudes. (credit: Nvidia)

Gaming hardware has done a lot in the last decade to push a lot of pixels very quickly across screens. But one piece of hardware has always led to complications: the eyeball. Nvidia is targeting that last part of the visual quality chain with its newest G-Sync offering, Pulsar .

Motion blur, when it's not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by "the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen," as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur , and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor's backlight.

You can't just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing "a novel algorithm" in "synergizing" its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting.

Enlarge / Nvidia's latest GPUs, apparently dropping out of hyperspace. (credit: Nvidia)

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  Nvidia's latest GPUs, apparently dropping out of hyperspace. [credit: Nvidia ]

If there’s been one consistent criticism of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards, it’s been pricing. All of Nvidia’s product tiers have seen their prices creep up over the last few years, but cards like the 4090 raised prices to new heights, while lower-end models like the 4060 and 4060 Ti kept pricing the same but didn’t improve performance much.

Today, Nvidia is sprucing up its 4070 and 4080 tiers with a mid-generation “Super” refresh that at least partially addresses some of these pricing problems. Like older Super GPUs, the 4070 Super, 4070 Ti Super, and 4080 Super use the same architecture and support all the same features as their non-Super versions, but with bumped specs and tweaked prices that might make them more appealing to people who skipped the originals.

The 4070 Super will launch first, on January 17th, for $599. The $799 RTX 4070 Ti Super launches on January 24th, and the $999 4080 Super follows on January 31st.