We’ve got some tentative good news on Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4070 — it might not be as expensive as it was originally assumed. While Moore’s Law Is Dead claimed the GPU would cost at least $750, today’s scoop shows that the YouTuber may have been wrong.
A new report tells us that Nvidia will set the price of the RTX 4070 to $600. That would be much more reasonable, but will the card’s performance be impressive enough to make it rank well among the best GPUs in 2023?
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is probably one of the most anticipated GPUs this year. Nvidia already released the behemoth RTX 4090, followed by the RTX 4080, and lastly, the RTX 4080 12GB in disguise, now known as the RTX 4070 Ti. All of these GPUs are expensive, with the latter priced at $800 at launch. This is why the initial prediction about the RTX 4070 was worrying.
If the GPU indeed arrived with a $750 to $800 price tag, as was speculated by Moore’s Law Is Dead, it would make next to no sense. A small $50 savings for what might be a sizable performance cut would make the GPU a laughing stock in the PC hardware market. Fortunately, today’s rumor tells us it might not be all that bad.
As reported by VideoCardz, Nvidia may have decided to set the official list price (MSRP) of the RTX 4070 to $600. This was supposedly said during a press briefing. Assuming this checks out, the GPU will be $200 cheaper than the RTX 4070 Ti, and it will have the same MSRP as the RTX 3070 Ti did at launch. Still, it’d cost $100 more than the RTX 3070 when it was first released.
The savings are most certainly welcome if this is true, but there’s also the performance per dollar factor to think about — and looking at the specs, this might not be Nvidia’s strongest suit, yet again. The RTX 4070 is said to come with 5,888 CUDA cores, which is exactly the same as the RTX 3070. It will sport more memory (12GB GDDR6X) and much higher clock speeds, but it also has a narrower 192-bit memory bus. The TDP is set to a modest 200 watts, which is less than the RTX 3070.
It’s hard to predict how the RTX 4070 will fare once it’s here. Videocardz claims that the release date has been set to April 13, so the final specifications and price are yet to be confirmed.
Nvidia’s RTX 3070 was, and continues to be, one of the most popular graphics cards of the Ampere generation — right alongside the RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, and the RTX 3070 Ti. If Nvidia ends up overpricing this midrange segment (as it arguably did with the RTX 4070 Ti), it will be hard for these GPUs to repeat the success of their predecessors.