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Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti could rival the RTX 3090 Ti — at less than half the price

The rumored specifications of Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti just leaked, and it looks like it’ll be one beast of a graphics card.

If the specs turn out to be true, the RTX 4070 Ti might be powerful enough to match the current-gen flagship RTX 3090 Ti, but it’s also expected to cost a lot less than the $1,999 GPU.

As I have mentioned before, there is an AD104 SKU with a 400W limit.
PG141-SKU331
a full-fat AD104 with 7680FP32
21Gbps 12G GDDR6X
It can easily match RTX 3090 Ti.

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) August 1, 2022

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This tantalizing bit of news comes from a fairly trustworthy source — Kopite7kimi, a well-known leaker in the GPU space. However, it’s best to not take it for granted and assume that everything is subject to change, especially if you consider that Nvidia might only release a single GPU this year, and if that happens, it won’t be the rumored RTX 4070 Ti.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about the exciting stuff — the specs of the upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, the successor to the RTX 3070 Ti. The latter had proven itself to be one of the best graphics cards this generation, and it seems that its successor might follow that same path and prove to be even better than previously expected.

Kopite7kimi talks about an AD104 GPU based on the PG141-SKU331 PCB. The card utilizes the full AD104 GPU core, which implies that it’s the RTX 4070 Ti and not the base RTX 4070 that is expected to feature a cut-down version of AD104. This would unlock a much higher power limit of 400 watts, and with that, a lot of potential performance.

The card is expected to come with 7,680 cores or 60 streaming multiprocessors (SMs). The leaker predicts a whole lot of memory for this GPU, with 12GB of GDDR6X memory clocked at 21Gbps across a 192-bit bus. Although Kopite didn’t mention that in their tweet, Wccftech notes that other rumors about the RTX 4070 Ti imply that it will also have a massive 48MB of L2 cache and 160 render output units (ROPs).

These specifications mark a huge increase from the RTX 3070 Ti, with a 25% boost in core count and a cache that’s 12 times larger. Unfortunately, Kopite7kimi didn’t talk about the clock speeds for this GPU, but something in the 2GHz-2.8GHz range seems like a safe prediction.

Now, let’s compare these specs to the current-gen flagship, the RTX 3090 Ti. The $1,999 flagship has a higher core count of 10,752, with 24GB of GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit bus. However, it has a drastically smaller L2 cache (6MB) and fewer ROPs (112). If the RTX 4070 Ti can match, or come close to, the RTX 3090 Ti in performance, it will be enough for the next-gen card to be a winner here.

We still don’t know how Nvidia will price the new graphics cards. With the current situation in the world, plus an oversupply of RTX 30-series GPUs lying around, there have been whispers of the list prices being quite high. However, if we assume that the RTX 4070 Ti will be priced in the $600-$700 range, which seems reasonable, it will still be a much better value than the RTX 3090 Ti.

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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