Nvidia has announced the GeForce RTX 4070, a 1440p warrior joining the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 in a collection of largely 4K-oriented RTX 40-series GPUs.

The green team also touted the RTX 4070 Ti as a powerful Quad HD component, although between its 4K capability and the RTX 4080’s breakout price, I’m still saying it’s best paired with a 4K monitor . Although the RTX 4070 continues the RTX 40 trend of premium pricing – £589 in the UK, $599 in the US – it will undercut the RTX 3080, targeting 100fps+ at 1440p with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The latter , of course, being an advantage that the old 30 series does not have.

The RTX 4070 goes on sale tomorrow, with a global release date of April 13. I will have a review of a board partner model ready for then, so in the meantime here are the details I follow not currently embargoed up to nine for – including full specs and performance data from Nvidia.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Price

Word from Nvidia is that the RTX 4070 will launch with a UK RRP of £589 and a US MSRP of $599. As with the RTX 4070 Ti at £799/$799, you can expect that to be the base price of lower-end models (relatively speaking), with overclocked and otherwise bloated partner cards costing more.

It’s hard not to look at that price, remember how the RTX 3070 came out at £469/$499 and gaze wistfully out of the nearest rain-covered window. This may be the cheapest RTX 40-series GPU yet, but it still intensifies the financial pressure of a possible graphics card upgrade, just like the rest of the current generation of GPUs. .

It’s worth noting that partner variants of the RTX 3070 regularly sell for £500+, so the price gap isn’t as big as it might have been if the older model had gone down a lot. in its two years on the market (as we all know, it spent much of that time doing the opposite). Nvidia also seems to be pitching the RTX 4070 as a cheaper alternative/replacement to the high-end RTX 3080: the RTX 4070 apparently works the same way without DLSS 3, and can use the upscaler’s frame generation feature to open a overall lead over the RTX. 3080. Only a few dozen games support DLSS 3 in full, although there’s no denying that the RTX 4070 is cheaper, with the RTX 3080 variants still fetching around £700.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 release date and availability

The RTX 4070 will be released worldwide on Thursday, April 13. This goes for all custom/overclocked/card partner models, as well as Nvidia’s own Founders Edition (pictured above).

The latter might be your best shot at grabbing an RTX 4070 at RRP/MSRP, depending on how many Nvidia-partnered manufacturers choose to release base-priced models, though it’s not as widely available as the inevitable. overabundance of personalized cards. Then again, the RTX 40 family has so far avoided the stock sterility that plagued the RTX 30 series, and given that the RTX 4070 is still quite an expensive GPU, I don’t foresee much trouble finding one. available on the 13th.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Specifications

The RTX 4070 is built around the same Nvidia AD104 processor as the RTX 4070 Ti, albeit a scaled down version. That means fewer shader cores (or CUDA cores, in brand terms) and a drop in the number of RT and Tensor cores, respectively for GeForce’s ray tracing and AI-assisted features. In fact, the RTX 4070 has the exact same number of RT and Tensor cores as the RTX 3070, although since the 4070’s Ada Lovelace architecture makes generational upgrades on both, each core should perform better on the newer model. . VRAM also gets an upgrade: maybe not so much the interface, but matching the RTX 4070 Ti’s 12GB of GDDR6X, the RTX 4070’s video memory is both faster and more plentiful than that of his predecessor.

Here’s how the RTX 4070 specs compare to its closest relative the RTX 40 series, as well as the RTX 3070:

One of the strengths of the RTX 4070 could turn out to be its efficiency. It’s nice to see Ada Lovelace’s power consumption improvements reflected in a 40-series GPU, especially with electric bills going up like… well, the price of a new graphics card, let’s be honest.

The RTX 4070 also won’t consistently hit 200W. Nvidia says its “average gaming power,” meaning the average usage you’d see when running games, is 186W. That’s down from an average gaming power of 215W on the RTX 3070 and especially down from 240W on the RTX 3070 Ti, which is also rated at 290W max.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 performance

I can’t share my own benchmarks until launch day, so for now, here’s a big green graphic from Nvidia themselves. This largely suggests that even when running games at max quality and ray tracing enabled, the RTX 4070 can use DLSS to exceed 100fps at 1440p. However, it doesn’t specify the quality level of DLSS used by these benchmarks: remember that its Ultra Performance setting will be much faster, but nowhere near as crisp as its Quality and Balanced modes.

It’s also odd that Nvidia didn’t include results from the RTX 3080, given that the RTX 4070 is supposed to match baseline performance (before overwhelming the most expensive card with a burst of DLSS 3 frame generation). Our most useful point of comparison therefore becomes the RTX 3070 Ti, which is consistently around 15-20 fps slower than the RTX 4070 without frame generation and 40-60 fps slower in games that support it.

Features Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070

You can probably tell from the fact that I’ve mentioned it four times already, but the most useful tool in the RTX 4070’s kit is almost certainly its DLSS 3 support. Like all cards in its series, up to the RTX 4090 , the RTX 4070 will be able to combine industry-leading DLSS upscaling with AI-generated interpolated frames that could double or even triple the average FPS. In games that support this generation of frames, anyway.

While DLSS 3 adds to system latency more than can be entirely countered with Nvidia Reflex, it’s a nifty piece of technology that can make 60fps games look like 120fps games. And, as expensive as the RTX 4070 is, it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for DLSS 3 compared to the RTX 4070 Ti.

The RTX 4070’s DLSS 3 compatibility and Tensor-powered AI could also make it an ideal platform for Nvidia’s RTX Remix mod tools, which we’ve already seen produce impressive results in Portal with RTX. Or, if you like game streaming, the RTX 4070 supports AV1 encoding out of the box. AV1 has a very good chance of becoming the video streaming format to beat, enabling higher quality images at much more efficient bitrates than the current standard, H.264.

Looking specifically at the Founders Edition, it appears to have ditched the dual-fan design of the RTX 3070 in favor of the “through-flow” cooler layout of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090. Its axial fans also move 20% more air than the fans on the RTX 3070 Ti, according to Nvidia. Expect a more conventional mix of dual and triple fan coolers on Custom/Partner models.