History has a way of repeating itself. Back in 2018, Nvidia released its first wave of RTX graphics cards, boasting RT and machine learning features – but also arriving with some eye-watering price rises. £530 for the RTX 2070, anyone? However, balance was restored to the Force with the 2019 ‘Super’ refresh, where 60, 70 and 80 class GPUs were beefed up in terms of specs with a price-cut to boot. So it is with the controversial RTX 40-series cards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. Saddled with unflattering price vs performance comparisons up against the RTX 3080 10GB, this time it’s the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti and 4080 that get the Super treatment.
It looks like Nvidia is going to release one new GPU per week and that kicks off with the RTX 4070 Super. It’s priced at $599 US/£579 UK – the same price as the RTX 4070 – and is essentially the same card as its predecessor, with two notable improvements. Firstly, the CUDA core count is significantly increased: 7168 cores vs 5888, meaning a nigh-on 22 percent improvement. And to push performance on still further, there’s a 10 percent increase in TGP – more juice to get more from the more fully enabled rendition of the AD104 processor. And as it is AD104 in place, there’s no chance of a wider memory interface, meaning we’re still on a 192-bit bus with 504GB/s of bandwidth – that bus also limiting the 4070 Super to the same 12GB of GDDR6X memory.
What we should be hoping for a good-sized performance lift to the standard RTX 4070, perhaps knocking on the door of RTX 4070 Ti performance without an increase in price. The vanilla 4070 gets a $50 price cut, meanwhile, with Nvidia heavily hinting that third party partners can reduce that still further to more meaningfully compete with AMD’s impressive RX 7800 XT. We’ll talk about the other Super cards in due course, but the specs don’t lie: RTX 4080 Super is all about the price cut down to $999/£959 with only a minimal spec boost. RTX 4070 Ti Super is interesting though: users are bumped up to AD103 silicon with the wider memory bus opening the door to 16GB of memory – sorely needed at its $799/£769 price level.
