Leaked GeForce RTX 4070 pricing confirms the GPU boom is officially over

PC gaming enthusiasts have been pondering the same question for many years; when will the best graphics card finally drop in price?

A very important point, as while building a rig has garnered renewed interest in 2023 due to tumbling CPU, memory and SSD prices, GPUs remain stubbornly expensive by comparison. Well, there’s good news as it seems a change is on the horizon.

The latest leaks have confirmed that Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 will arrive on the market in less than a fortnight priced at $599. That’s significantly less than the $699 figure being bandied about on the rumour mill in recent months.

Why is this significant, given that the adjusted figure is still a hundred bucks more than the $499 launch price of RTX 3070 a few years back? We’re going to go out on a limb and suggest it feels as though the tide is slowly turning. RTX 40 Series, for all its might, has remained in stock and widely available as consumers shy away amid a cost-of-living crisis.

Similar woes have affected other players. AMD attempted to aim high with RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, only to be met with muted reception. The latter is already seeing price cuts in an effort to generate sales, and excess stock of previous-generation parts isn’t helping matters. Even Intel, new to the scene, has come to the realisation that significant price cuts are necessary for Arc to make waves.

Our conversations with industry partners reveal AMD is scurrying to respond to Nvidia’s mooted price point. Given that RTX 4070 is almost certain to hold a compelling lead with regards to raytracing and DLSS tech, a fabled Radeon RX 7900 (non-XT) would have to be priced extremely competitively. Is a 7900 Series at $549 even feasible? We’ll have to see, but one thing’s for certain, PC graphics cards are about to get seriously interesting all over again.

To reiterate, the below table helpfully illustrates how RTX 4070 is expected to shape up.

GeForce	RTX 4090	RTX 4080	RTX 4070 TI	RTX 4070*
Launch date	Oct 2022	Nov 2022	Jan 2023	Apr 2023
Codename	AD102	AD103	AD104	AD104
Architecture	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace
Process (nm)	4	4	4	4
SMs	128 of 144	76 of 80	60 of 60	46 of 60
CUDA cores	16,384	9,728	7,680	5,888
Boost clock (MHz)	2,520	2,505	2,610	2,475
Peak FP32 TFLOPS	82.6	48.7	40.1	29.1
RT cores	128	76	60	46
Tensor cores	512	304	240	184
Texture units	512	304	240	184
Memory size (GB)	24	16	12	12
Memory type	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X
Memory bus (bits)	384	256	192	192
Memory clock (Gbps)	21	22.4	21	21
Bandwidth (GB/s)	1,008	717	504	504
Power (watts)	450	320	285	200
Launch MSRP ($)	1,599	1,199	799	599