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Rumor mill: The next entry in Nvidia’s powerful but wallet-crushing Ada Lovelace series, the RTX 4070, looks set to arrive this April. The tech giant has reportedly revealed to its partners plans for launching the card in two months, though it never confirmed a precise date.
VideoCardz writes that it attained embargo documents from Nvidia revealing release information for the RTX 4070. The embargo information is listed as To Be Determined (TBD), but the on-shelf date, which is the actual launch, is down as April.
The RTX 4070 is, of course, the recently released RTX 4070 Ti‘s (formerly the RTX 4080 12GB) little brother. Like its sibling, the card will likely be based on the AD104 GPU and pack 12GB of GDDR6X memory.
PG141-SKU343 RTX 4070 Reference Edition AD104-250-A1
PG141-SKU344 RTX 4070 Founders Edition AD104-250-A1
PG141-SKU345 RTX 4070 Reference Edition AD104-251-A1 https://t.co/MtBgLDAU1q— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) February 7, 2023
Being a less-powerful, non-Ti version means the RTX 4070’s GPU will be cut down to 5,888 cuda cores and have speeds between 1,920 MHz and 2,475 MHz. The RTX 4070 Ti, for comparison, has 7,680 cuda cores and operates between 2,310 MHz and 2,610 MHz. As such, the upcoming card is predicted to offer 29 TFLOPs of maximum FP32 performance, down from the 40 TFLOPs found in the RTX 4070 Ti.
The reduced performance means the RTX 4070’s power consumption is expected to be less than the Ti version: Its 200W total board power (TBP) is 85W lower than the most recent Lovelace entry.
That brings us to the all-important price. The RTX 4070 Ti launched with a $799 MSRP, though finding one at that price point isn’t easy. As we noted in our review of the card, it should cost no more than $700. Nvidia has taken plenty of justifiable criticism for its pricing strategy for the Ada Lovelace series, so it will be interesting to see how much it has listened, if at all, when it comes to the RTX 4070. As a reminder, the RTX 3060 Ti launched with a $400 MSRP, while the vanilla RTX 3060 cost $330.
Following the RTX 4070 could be the RTX 4060. According to purported benchmarks, the latter card can go head-to-head with the RTX 3070 Ti in terms of performance. The Ampere equivalent of the RTX 4060 is flying up the Steam survey GPU charts, but Nvidia will need to price the successor competitively if it wants to repeat that success.
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