If there’s an event that those into PC gaming are waiting for this year, it’s surely the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. Set to succeed the current RTX 30 cards in the market right now, technology company Nvidia is likely to announce its new line of consumer GPUs this September, with the first graphics card (the GeForce RTX 4090) launching in October according to rumors.
Nvidia makes GPUs (short for Graphics Processing Units) which are the chips that go on the graphics cards themselves, which are mostly made by the company’s third-party partners such as Zotac, MSI and Gigabyte. Nvidia, though, also makes its own graphics cards (the “Founders Edition” models) which can be bought directly from the company’s website.
And the new RTX 40 series cards will be powered by the new AD102 to AD107 GPUs, which can be customized by manufacturers to make different models of graphics cards such as the GeForce RTX 4070, one of the most highly anticipated cards Nvidia is planning to launch in the coming months. Apparently, the AD104 GPU (which forms the basis of the RTX 4070) could potentially be used to make a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti card too.
Nvidia has actually released more powerful “Ti” variants of its graphics cards over the years, but it seems that the standard GeForce RTX 4070, AD104-powered card will apparently be able to match the current RTX 30 series flagship (the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti), as claimed by a well-known hardware leaker in a recent tweet (via VideoCardz).
This is because the card’s specs have seemingly been updated, now matching those of a previously rumored GeForce RTX 4070 Ti model.
There is an update of RTX 4070.
PG141-SKU331
7680FP32
12G 21Gbps GDDR6X
300W
TSE >11000— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) August 4, 2022
According to the leak, the AD104-powered GeForce RTX 4070 will now feature 12 GB of GDDR6X memory, as opposed to 10 GB of GDDR6 RAM, which was the rumored memory capacity of the GeForce RTX 4070 until this point. Aside from this, the card will now apparently pack 7680 CUDA cores (individual processing units which perform graphics tasks) vs the previously rumored 7168.
The sum of these things should give it a performance boost, and maybe even overpower the RTX 3090 Ti. Hardware leaker kopite7kimi claims the card will achieve a score in the 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme benchmark of more than 11,000.
The thing is, it’s not clear whether these performance claims are based on actual hardware being tested in Nvidia’s labs, or whether these are estimates based on the currently expected hardware configuration of the GeForce RTX 4070 card.
It makes sense, though, for Nvidia to bump up the specs of the card – the RTX 4070’s previously expected 10 GB of memory and somewhat narrow 160-bit memory bus might have been underwhelming for some people. This is despite the fact that recently leaked 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme score had suggested the RTX 4070 could be as fast as the high-end RTX 3090 (in this benchmark, at least).
So the RTX 4070 will feature a 192-bit bus, plus 12 GB of memory as stated earlier, meaning it not only has 2 GB more (plus more memory bandwidth) than previous leaks had claimed too…
Nvidia is yet to reveal its RTX 40 series cards (A GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is shown in this image).
This means there’s another reason why some may settle for the vanilla GeForce RTX 4070 instead of waiting for the Ti model (if the latter is actually a thing, that is). This is that the RTX 4070 Ti could consume up to 400 W of power, more than a third than the non-Ti model (300 W) according to previous leaks.
Also, recent rumors suggest the GeForce RTX 4070 could be delayed until early 2023, meaning that a Ti model likely will not launch until the second half of next year at least, so many would-be upgraders will likely choose to go for a standard RTX 4070 or pick up one of the more expensive options such as the RTX 4080 instead of choosing to wait. But now with its updated specs, the RTX 4070 is definitely a much more attractive proposition.
Either way, here’s hoping there’s official word from Nvidia on its upcoming RTX 40 series graphics cards soon, as this surely will be one of the most exciting graphics card launches in a very long time for sure.
GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)