Oops – it looks like Gigabyte might have just spoiled a big surprise from Nvidia, with the third party GPU manufacturer accidentally leaking two new graphics cards: the Gigabyte RTX 4070 AERO OC 12GB and Gigabyte RTX 4060 GAMING OC 8GB.
The timing isn’t great (not that leaks are ever well timed), as Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is currently taking place. While Nvidia would rather we concentrated on news coming out of the conference regarding its AI advancements and enterprise-grade technology, the latest hints that we could finally be getting more affordable consumer cards could overshadow much of what Team Green shows.
As Videocardz reports, references to “GV-N4070AERO OC-12G” and “GV-N4060GAMING OC-8GD” products have been spotted in the latest version of the Gigabyte Control Center software, which is used for things like monitoring and overclocking GPUs and configuring RGB lighting.
Unlike some manufacturers, Gigabyte’s internal product naming conventions means its relatively easy to decipher what GPUs they could be referring to: an RTX 4070 with 12GB of memory and an RTX 4060 with 8GB.
Bad news for Nvidia, good news for gamers
This leak looks pretty conclusive, and it’s a slip up that could annoy Nvidia, which has yet to officially announce the RTX 4070 or RTX 4060. While I wasn’t expecting Nvidia to announce either GPU at GTC, due to the conference’s focus on AI and enterprise-level computing, leaks like this threaten to undermine any launch plans Nvidia might be cooking up.
Videocardz claims it has information that the RTX 4070 will be announced on April 12, but doesn’t have similar info on the RTX 4060.
While this leak may be bad news for Nvidia, as it may have wanted to keep these GPUs as a big surprise, it’s pretty good news for gamers.
So far, Nvidia has only released expensive, high-end, desktop GPUs in its latest 40 series ‘Ada Lovelace’ lineup: the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti. While these are some of the best graphics cards ever made, not everyone can afford (or needs) such powerful GPUs.
For many PC gamers on a budget, it began to feel like Nvidia had forgotten about them. Neglecting a big part of the market is never a good idea, no matter how solid your position as market leader is, and rivals AMD and Intel were more than happy to swoop in with affordable graphics cards.
While Nvidia has released more mainstream and affordable RTX 40 series mobile GPUs for laptops, that wasn’t much use for desktop gamers looking to upgrade their rigs.
So, it’s great to see that Nvidia may be planning to finally release affordable GPUs again – although, without an official announcement, we currently don’t know what prices they’ll launch up. I’d have once said that Nvidia isn’t foolish enough to launch these GPUs at much higher prices than their RTX 30 series counterparts, but Team Green has been making some weird decisions recently, so I won’t get too excited until I hear official prices.
