Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super could be almost equal to the RTX 4080 and a seriously good GPU... but with one potential catch
Will it sell out in a flash? Especially if it is as peppy as this leak suggests
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super is the next refreshed graphics card in the firm’s trio of revamped Super editions, releasing next week, and we’ve just caught sight of some leaked benchmarks.
Benchleaks is the source of many benchmark leaks (you’d never guess) on X (formerly Twitter), and has unearthed OpenCL and Vulkan scores from Geekbench 6 (as Tom’s Hardware noticed).
[GB6 GPU] Unknown GPUCPU: Intel Core i9-14900K (24C 32T)CPUID: B0671 (GenuineIntel)GPU: GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPERAPI: Open CLScore: 229043PCI-ID: 10DE:2705VRAM: 15.99 GBhttps://t.co/FVSkOZjcfMJanuary 18, 2024
The RTX 4070 Ti Super scored 229,043 in the OpenCL test, and notably the current RTX 4080 GPU is only 5% faster than that. In the Vulkan test, the 4070 Ti Super obtained a result of 222,435 (add seasoning with all this pre-release leakage), and that’s actually 7% faster than the RTX 4080.
Compared to the existing RTX 4070 Ti, the new Ti Super variant is 11% and 26% faster in those two Geekbench tests respectively, all of which is suitably eye-opening.
Analysis: A great GPU, perhaps – but what about those stock levels?
While these results are certainly impressive, there are of course some quite weighty caveats to be considered here. We always say it when Geekbench scores come up, but it bears repeating – it’s hardly the first choice for gaming benchmarks (that’d be 3DMark).
Ideally, we want to see non-synthetic real-world tests as a measure of gaming performance, naturally, and we do have a few small clues from Nvidia itself on that front.
When revealing its new RTX Super refreshes, Team Green provided some game comparisons, but what wasn’t so useful is that Nvidia did the usual trick of only comparing the 4070 Ti Super to older graphics cards, such as the RTX 3070 Ti and 2070 Super, and not its current Lovelace siblings. Mind you, in terms of the advance on its predecessor, the results looked good (the 4070 Ti Super was over 3x as fast in Alan Wake 2, for example, with ray tracing on at 1440p).
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The broad expectation from the rumor mill sits at a 15% performance uplift – best-case scenario, or maybe more like 10% – for the RTX 4070 Ti Super compared to the RTX 4070 Ti it succeeds (and entirely replaces, if the rumors are right – Nvidia is set to stop production of the vanilla Ti, and sell existing stock through, then that’s that).
Comparing to the RTX 4080, the 4070 Ti Super is supposedly around 5% to 10% shy, so this latest leak points towards the former more optimistic scenario. We could, then, be looking at a compelling GPU that’s close to the equal of the existing RTX 4080 – which in itself is again rumored to be discontinued (and replaced by the other incoming refresh, the RTX 4080 Super) – but which is much cheaper.
Regarding those theoretically scrapped graphics cards, this could be the rub for the RTX 4070 Ti Super.
By which we mean that while the outgoing RTX 4080 doesn’t have much stock left to sell – it has performed poorly, and Nvidia hasn’t done much with production volume as a result – the RTX 4070 Ti likely does. And this may be the reason why other rumors have indicated that of the three incoming RTX Super refreshes, the RTX 4070 Ti Super is going to have the lowest stock levels at launch. Nvidia and its partners need to sell through the more substantial existing inventory of 4070 Ti cards before it can crank production of the successor, and that could be some way down the line.
If this graphics card is in demand as a good performer, plus it has low stock, that means it could sell out very quickly on launch day (unlike the RTX 4070 Super, notably). Time will tell, as ever, and it’s worth remembering that Nvidia won’t be selling the RTX 4070 Ti Super itself either – it won’t have a Founders Edition, just third-party custom boards. (And given all the above rumors, these could be pricier than we’d like, perhaps).
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).