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Oops — Nvidia has just accidentally revealed a brand new GPU

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is reportedly right around the corner, but the chipmaker is yet to release any official announcement about the new GPU. It still managed to confirm its existence in a stealthy way.

The latest addition to Nvidia’s lineup of the best graphics cards appeared in a slide that shows off Nvidia Reflex. The technology is coming to Counter-Strike 2, and the RTX 4070 is most likely coming to various retailers in just a few days. Did Nvidia really intend to reveal it in such a low-key way?

Slide showing the performance of Nvidia Reflex.
Nvidia / The Verge

Nvidia Reflex is Nvidia’s latency-reducing tech which improves the responsiveness of supported games by lowering the time that passes between when you input your next move and see the action appear on the screen.

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In games such as Counter-Strike, this technology is truly able to shine. First-person shooter (FPS) games benefit from lower latency more than most other titles, but unfortunately, CS:GO doesn’t have access to Reflex. We now know that Nvidia worked with Valve in order to bring Reflex to Counter-Strike 2, set to release sometime this year.

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Nvidia appears to have prepared an official slide that highlights how well Reflex works in the upcoming shooter. To do this, it compared three GPUs — the GTX 1060, RTX 3060, and lastly, the unannounced (but heavily rumored) RTX 4070. The Verge was the first to share the slide.

According to the slide, Nvidia Reflex can lower latency in Counter-Strike 2 by as much as 35 percent. On the GTX 1060, the latency went down from 26 ms to 17 ms — that’s a massive difference. The upcoming RTX 4070 was only able to gain an extra 2 ms, but the latency was much lower to begin with, so it’s still the most responsive of all three, and that’s with or without Reflex.

Nvidia’s choice of GPUs for this demo was interesting. Including the RTX 3060 makes some sense here, although the RTX 3070 would make for a more logical option. The GTX 1060 looks like it’s only there to make the RTX 4070 shine by comparison, although Reflex will be available in Counter-Strike 2 on graphics cards starting from the GTX 900 series, so that might explain it.

The RTX 4070 is rumored to drop on April 13. The aforementioned slide tells us that it exists, but Nvidia hasn’t confirmed the release date in any official manner. Based on leaks, we know that the GPU will likely have 5,888 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X memory, and it’s said to be priced at $600. Nvidia’s way of announcing the new GPU does very little to help drive up the hype for it, which implies that this announcement may not have been intentional.

Monica J. White
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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