Latest rumour prices Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4070 at $599
Still not great for a fourth-tier card, but as good as we could reasonably hope for.
Once rumoured to be launching at $749, the latest scuttlebutt is pricing Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4070 graphics card at a much more palatable $599.
Well, that's palatable in relative terms given the RTX 4070 Ti is a $799 board, the RTX 4080 is $1,299 and the RTX 4090 $1,599. It's still $100 more than the RTX 3070's $499 launch price back in 2021, albeit the RTX 3070 scarcely sold at that price due to the ongoing, but now departed, GPU craze.
Anyway, what does your rumoured $599 buy you? Nothing, officially, but there are rumours for the specs, too, and with the card expected to appear next month, the probability of their accuracy is fairly high.
So, here goes. The RTX 4070 is said to have exactly the same CUDA core count as the old RTX 3070 at 5,888, but a smaller 192-bit memory bus to the RTX 3070's 256-bit bus. The 192-bit bus is pretty much a certainty given the RTX 4070 Ti has a 192-bit bus. There's zero chance of the 4070 sticking with a 256-bit bus.
If all that sounds worrisome, well, the RTX 4070 will have higher memory and core clocks. And, if it follows standard RTX 40-series trends, a whole lot more last level cache memory, too. The rumours put the core clock at just under 2.5GHz, which if true will be a decent step up on the 3070's 1.725GHz. Net result? 29TFLOPS of raw compute to the RTX 3070's 20 TFLOPS.
Much faster GDDR6X memory likewise means that the rumoured RTX 4070 weighs in with 504GB/s of bandwidth, slightly up on the 3070's 448GB/s. Oh, and the 192-bit bus means 12GB of graphics memory, a worthwhile step over the 3070's 8GB.
That raw compute figure is also a big step up over the old RTX 3070 Ti, too, which hits 22TFLOPS, and is pretty much dead on for the venerable RTX 3080. On the other hand, it's well down on the RTX 4070 Ti's official 40TFLOP capability.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
Do the math, and the 4070 Ti works out at just under $20 per TFLOP, while the mooted 4070 comes in just above $20 per TFLOP. Incidentally, the RTX 4090 also works out at about $20 per TFLOP. And that sums up our issue with this latest RTX 40 series of Nvidia GPUs.
Since when did top-end GPUs compete with fourth-tier graphics cards for pure value? Since never. This is new. And it's not much fun.
Still, this latest rumour is about as good as you can reasonably expect from Nvidia. It's hard to see Nvidia pricing the RTX 4070 below $599, at launch at least.
So, yeah, that's the world we live. One where you can get a nice 165Hz 1440p monitor for $240, but a rumoured Nvidia '70-class GPU for $599 somehow seems like a relatively good prospect. Oh well.