AMD could have Nvidia scared enough to revive the RTX 4080… as the RTX 4070 Ti
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti, the rumored impending graphics card that will be the third Lovelace offering, has witnessed a spec spill – and the apparent takeaway is that it’s identical to the canceled RTX 4080 12GB.
The purported specs were highlighted by video cardz (opens in new tab) and come directly from a card manufacturer, namely Colorful, who aired the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe on its website. While the product page is now broken down, it showed most of the BattleAx card’s specs, as well as images.
The graphics card is black with a red border, but otherwise looks pretty basic, and it uses the same cooler as the RTX 4080 16GB – which says a lot about its resemblance to the ditched 12GB version of the 4080.
Moreover, as we mentioned at the beginning, the specs provided are identical. The Colorful RTX 4070 Ti runs at the same clock speed as the ‘unlaunched’ 4080 12GB (2310MHz base clock) and has 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM with a 192-bit memory bus. TDP is listed at 285W, again exactly the same as the canceled lower-end 4080 (and of course the 4070 Ti also uses the same GPU – the AD104).
Analysis: Nvidia is in a tricky pricing area
While this leak seems pretty solid – coming from an actual mapmaker, complete with a host of images of the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe – we should be a little wary of the specs provided. There’s a chance that whoever created the product page made a mistake – after all, the page itself that goes up appears to have been an accident – or rather multiple mistakes (on multiple points of specification), but that doesn’t seem very plausible.
In any case, what does it tell us if we fool this leak? That Nvidia appears to be re-releasing the RTX 4080 12GB as the RTX 4070 Ti, and while we knew this was coming to a point, we expected some minor tweaks to differentiate the models (such as clocks that may have been tweaked a bit). Looks like this one literal relaunch of the exact same card.
While that said, one important part of the specification is missing, and that is the number of CUDA cores. AD104 has been realized as the full-fledged version with all 7,680 cores in the 4080 12GB, so we’re not sure if that will be the case for the RTX 4070 Ti.
There remains the possibility that Nvidia will differentiate the 4070 Ti with a slightly smaller amount of CUDA cores. That way Team Green can say “look, this card is different from that canceled 4080,” and that also justifies Nvidia lowering the price slightly from the $899 the lower-end 4080 was thrown at. The danger is that if Nvidia unveils what appears to be the same graphics card for $100 less – or maybe even cheaper – the question arises as to why the 4080 12GB was priced so high?
However, the rumor mill firmly believes that the 4070 Ti will work with the full 7,680 CUDA cores, and if it is actually identical to the 4080 12GB, how does Nvidia justify a price drop? Because pushing the 4070 Ti for $899 (as the same card in all but the name) certainly won’t be an option, especially given Nvidia’s unpopularity due to the existing prices of Lovelace GPUs, and especially the RTX 4080 16GB.
This is just speculation, but another rumor may come into play here. Nvidia is supposedly considering a price cut for the RTX 4080 16GB, in response to disappointing sales (certainly when compared to the RTX 4090) and to raise its popularity level overall, perhaps – and no doubt to support AMD’s incoming launch of RDNA 3 GPUs counter, too. And if that 4080 16GB price drops significantly, that gives Nvidia justification to have the RTX 4070 Ti at a lower price, even if it has the same specs – because the launch price attached to the 4080 12GB is no longer relevant would be (with the 16 GB model being cheaper).
We’ll see, but one thing this sighting of the RTX 4070 Ti in a list of images provides is another strong hint that launch is close enough, which with Colorful seemingly ready to deal with its website material and apparently with it gun jumps a little here. The rumor mill assumes the 4070 Ti will debut on January 5, and that’s been the theory for a while.
