Today brings us grim news about the possible pricing of Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4070. According to Moore’s Law Is Dead, the GPU might turn out to be really expensive.
Rumor has it that the GPU will cost at least $750, but custom models prepared by Nvidia’s board partners will cost closer to $800 and more. For reference, the recommended list price of the RTX 4070 Ti is $800. Can these prices really be true?
Nvidia makes some of the best graphics cards, but unfortunately, solid performance comes at an ever-increasing price. The company itself hasn’t revealed any details yet, but it’s clear that the RTX 4070, a strange follow-up to the RTX 4070 Ti, is on the imminent horizon. The price remains up in the air, but Moore’s Law Is Dead is a prolific leaker in the GPU space, so the YouTuber might not be far off.
The leaker says that Nvidia will set the MSRP (recommended price) of the RTX 4070 to $750. As always, Nvidia’s partners will make improved versions of the card, and those will likely cost around $800. This kind of pricing makes very little sense when you consider that most consumers could just get an RTX 4070 Ti instead, which will undoubtedly offer better performance.
Nvidia has reportedly decided to split the review embargo for the GPU in two. The embargo for cards priced at $750 is said to lift on April 12, followed by more expensive cards on April 13. If this is true, could it be Nvidia’s way of trying to lead with the cards that are slightly less expensive? Then again, $50 doesn’t make too much of a difference when the GPU is already pricey. It’s hard to make sense of all this.
If the pricing checks out, it’s not only strange in comparison to current-gen offerings, but also to the last generation. Assuming that the RTX 4070 launches at $750, this will make it cost $250 more than the RTX 3070 did upon release ($500). The RTX 3080 launched at $700.
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is said to be based on the AD 104-250/251 GPU. It may come with 5,888 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6X RAM, and a clock speed of up to 2,475MHz. That’s a considerable downgrade from the RTX 4070 Ti, which comes with 7,680 cores and can be boosted up to 2,610MHz, although the VRAM size stays the same. The core count is also the same as in the RTX 3070, but the upgrade to Ada architecture should still deliver solid performance gains.
Many predict that Nvidia’s new GPU may even match the RTX 3080 Ti in performance while offering RTX 40-series upgrades, such as access to DLSS 3. That might very well turn out to be true, but let’s hope that the GPU will be slightly more reasonably priced.
