Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, the impending graphics card that would be Lovelace's third offering, has seen a spec spill, with the apparent takeaway being that it's identical to the canceled RTX 4080 12GB.
The alleged specs were highlighted by VideoCardz (opens in a new tab) and come directly from a card manufacturer, namely Colorful, which released the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe on its website. Although the product page has now been removed, it displayed most of the BattleAx card's specifications, along with images.
The graphics card is black with a red border, but otherwise looks pretty plain, and it uses the same cooler as the 4080GB RTX 16, which is telling in terms of its resemblance to the discontinued 12GB version of the 4080. .
Also, as we mentioned at the beginning, the specifications provided are identical. The colorful RTX 4070 Ti runs at the same clock speed as the "unreleased" 4080GB 12 (2310 MHz base clock) and features 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM with a 192-bit memory bus. The TDP is listed at 285 W, exactly the same as the canceled lower-tier 4080 (and of course the 4070 Ti also uses the same GPU: the AD104).
Analysis: Nvidia is in a difficult pricing zone
While this leak looks pretty solid, coming from an actual card manufacturer, with plenty of images of the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe, we still need to be a bit careful about the specs provided. There is a possibility that whoever put together the product page made a mistake; after all, the page itself appears to have been an accident, or rather, multiple bugs (at multiple spec points), but it doesn't seem very likely.
In any case, taking this flight to the letter, what does it tell us? That Nvidia appears to be relaunching the 4080GB RTX 12 as the RTX 4070 Ti, and while we knew it was coming to a head, we were hoping for small tweaks to differentiate the models (like clocks tuned up a bit, perhaps). It seems to be a literal repetition of the same letter.
That being said, a key part of the specification is missing, which is the CUDA Core count. The AD104 was made as a full version with all 7680 cores of the 4080GB 12, so we're not sure if that will be the case with the RTX 4070 Ti.
The possibility remains that Nvidia will differentiate the 4070 Ti with a slightly reduced number of CUDA cores. That way Team Green can say "look, this card is different from the canceled 4080", and also justify Nvidia slashing the price a bit from the €899 it released for the lower-tier 4080. The danger is that if Nvidia reveals what appears to be the same graphics card a hundred bucks cheaper, or possibly even cheaper, it raises the question as to why the 4080GB 12 was priced so high, then.
However, rumor has it that the 4070 Ti will run full 7680 CUDA cores, and if it is in fact identical to the 4080GB 12, how does Nvidia justify a price drop? Because launching the 4070 Ti at €899 (as the same card in all but name) is surely not going to be an option, especially given Nvidia's unpopularity due to existing Lovelace GPU and RTX 4080 16GB pricing in particular.
This is all speculation, but this is where another rumor potentially comes into play: Nvidia is allegedly considering lowering the price of the 4080GB RTX 16, in response to sales difficulties (certainly compared to the RTX 4090) and to increase their overall popularity levels. perhaps, and certainly also to combat the impending release of AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs. And if the price of the 4080GB 16 drops significantly, that gives Nvidia a justification for having the RTX 4070 Ti at a lower price, even if it's the same spec, because the launch price pegs at the 4080GB 12 it would no longer be relevant (with the being the cheapest 16GB model).
We'll see, but one thing this sighting of the RTX 4070 Ti in a listing with images does is another strong hint that the launch is pretty close, with Colorful apparently ready to go with its website materials, and apparently jumping around a bit. . here. The rumor mill believes the 4070 Ti will debut on January 5, and that's been the theory for a while now.
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