For most people, the RTX 40 is nothing more than a metaphysical entity being discussed on hardware websites like the one you’re reading. In other words, these graphics cards are unattainable objects for their buyers due to their high cost. Jen Hsen Huang’s offerings are rolling out in descending order of power and price, but we haven’t seen the RTX 4070 from NVIDIA yet, which will come next. And the latest rumors don’t give much hope, even if they turn out to be true.
We must start with the fact that the RTX 4070 is expected to be a card derived from the current RTX 4070 Ti, which means it will use the same chip but in a different variant. As for the memory configuration, it is also anticipated to have GDDR192X with a 6-bit bus, but it will be slightly slower. Of course, there will be fewer active cores on the chip and probably slightly slower memory, resulting in lower power consumption.
Is this the price for the NVIDIA RTX 4070?
What do we know at this point? The number of active cores, the so-called CUDA cores, is 46 SMs with 5888 units, while the 4070 Ti has 60 SMs with 7680 units of the same type. Both clearly share the same architecture. As for the final clock speeds, they are as follows:
RTX 4070 with a 1910 MHz base clock versus 2310 MHz for the RTX 4070 Ti. RTX 4070 with a 2475 MHz boost speed versus 2610 MHz for the RTX 4070 Ti. This results in a 29 TFLOPS compute power compared to 40 TFLOPS for its sibling. 200W TDP versus 285W.
Now, in the last few hours, internet gossip seems to suggest that NVIDIA will sell the RTX 4070 for $749 in its version. This is a 30.7% higher cost than the RTX 3070 and only 50 currency units cheaper than the RTX 4070 Ti. This is quite eyebrow-raising, and given the skepticism, it feels like NVIDIA is shooting itself in the foot
Why are we skeptical about the price?
The reason is that, following the rule of thumb regarding the raw power of the card, in all its aspects, the RTX 4070 has 72.5% of the power of the 4070 Ti. Therefore, in terms of power-to-price, we should expect a graphics card closer to $600. The price would be higher than its predecessor, but the performance would be justifiable.
Recently, AMD released the RX 7900 XT, which has lower performance compared to the amount paid. The result? These cards are gathering dust on store shelves, and just a few days ago, AMD was reluctantly forced to lower the prices to clear them out. It is hard to imagine that NVIDIA would be so blind as to not recognize the consequences of setting prices too high if they were to enter an excessive pricing spiral.
