The Nvidia RTX 4070 doesn't get as much attention or buzz as Nvidia's next-gen flagship card, the Nvidia RTX 4090, but it's possibly the most important card of the entire Nvidia Lovelace launch lineup.
Though the Nvidia GTC 2022 event came and went on September 20, there was no news at all about the midrange GPU, which is especially since the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 is – in our expert opinion – could be one of the best graphics cards on the market for most people other than the Nvidia RTX GeForce 3060 Ti.
And given many of the rumors we've heard of the RTX 4070, we're expecting a remarkably powerful graphics card, possibly even more powerful than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080.
The Nvidia RTX 4090 is already available, along with the Nvidia RTX 4080 - although the 12GB version of that card was hastily unlaunched, and is now expected to return with a more appropriate name: the RTX 4070 Ti.
All of this is rumor and speculation at this point though, so it remains to be seen how this card stacks up against the best Nvidia GeForce graphics cards on the market, but there are a lot of things we've heard that make this the one graphics card that we're most interested in seeing in the coming weeks and months.
Nvidia RTX 4070: Cut to the chase
- What is it? Nvidia's next-gen "midrange" graphics card.
- When will it be available? It might launch as soon as January 2023
- What will it cost? Given inflation, likely slightly higher than the RTX 3070
Nvidia RTX 4070: Release date
Most of the upcoming Lovelace-series graphics cards, with the exception of the already-available GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080, might be launching in January 2023.
Before it was thought that the GeForce RTX 4070 would have a mid-November 2022 launch due to rumors from Kopite7kimi of the 4090 launching in July or August. But more recent leaks have pointed to January 5 as a possible launch date for the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti - something that would line up well with Nvidia's planned showcase event on January 3 at CES 2023.
Nvidia RTX 4070: Price
With the ludicrous $1,599 starting price of the RTX 4090 and the RTX 4080 sitting at a still-costly $1,199, how much the RTX 4070 will cost is anybody's guess. Given that the canceled RTX 4080 12GB was originally going to launch at $899, we can at least say that it'll be cheaper than that, but almost certainly more expensive than the previous-gen RTX 3070.
The major and most obvious reason would be due to the increased specs of the 4070, which all but demands a higher price. Global inflation also plays a major role here.
The RTX 4070 Ti might not retain the pricing of the card it once was, but we'd be surprised to see it dip below $799 - that means we can probably expect a price for this RTX 4070 somewhere in the realms of $599-$699, unless Nvidia decides to enact a blanket price drop to fight back against AMD's highly competitive pricing for the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
Nvidia RTX 4070: Specs
Thanks to a recent leak, we now have a concrete idea of what the RTX 4070's specs will look like (although remember that these details should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they haven't been officially confirmed by Nvidia just yet).
The RTX 4070 is purported to use the same AD104 GPU die as the RTX 4070 Ti (and the erstwhile RTX 4080 12GB), but it'll be a slightly cut-down version of the GPU found in that card. If the leak is accurate, the RTX 4070 will pack 5,888 CUDA cores, 184 tensor cores, and 46 streaming multiprocessors.
The cut-down AD104 chip will have the same 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM at 21Gbps, as well as the same 192-bit memory bus and 504GB/s bandwidth - though the L2 cache is a bit smaller at 36MB. The boost clock should be the same, though, sitting at a respectable 2,610MHz. Mercifully, this card is predicted to have a TDP of 250W - a pleasant change from the monstrously power-hungry flagship cards we're seeing at the moment.
