Nvidia's RTX 4070 reportedly arrives in April and looks much slower than a 4070 Ti

Nvidia RTX 4080 crossed out. — (Image credit: Nvidia)

Hot on the heals of leaked benchmarks of Nvidia's RTX 4060 comes news of a mooted April launch date for its slightly bigger sister, the RTX 4070.

Our old friends at Videocardz got hold of purported embargo documents detailing Nvidia's launch plans for the RTX 4070. The precise announcement date for the new graphics card hasn't been detailed. But reports reckon this GPU will be on shelves come April.

Specs-wise, the RTX 4070 is expected to weigh in with 5,888 of Nvidia's pixel prettifying CUDA cores, and a maximum boost clock of 2,475MHz. That compares with the RTX 4070 Ti's confirmed, launched and benchmarked 7,680 cores, which top out at 2,610MHz.

The 4070 gets the same 192-bit memory bus, 12GB of GDDR6X and 504GB/s of bandwidth. All told, the 4070 is said to be good for 29TFLOPS of raw compute. That's a fair old whack behind the 40TFLOPS of the RTX 4070 Ti.

For further context, that 29TFLOPS would put the new RTX 4070 at the same level as the RTX 3080 from the previous Ampere generation. That's still nearly 50% faster than the 20TFLOPS its last-gen counterpart, the RTX 3070, came packing.

There's more to gaming performance than TFLOPS, of course. But it's interesting to note that the RTX 4070 has exactly the same number of CUDA cores as the old RTX 3070 at 5,888.

Your next upgrade

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest

Much of the performance boost is therefore down to higher clockspeeds. The old RTX 3070 boosted up to 1,725MHz versus the 2,475MHz of the new RTX 4070.

The final piece of the puzzle is pricing. With the RTX 4070 Ti slotting in at $799, what price dare we hope the RTX 4070 goes for? When the old RTX 3070 was a $499 GPU at launch, and every RTX 40-series card so far has been more expensive than the model, we're guessing $599 or thereabouts.

Whatever, it seems likely that the RTX 4070 will sit somewhere between $549 and $649. So no, the it ain't gonna be cheap. But then you knew that.

Moore's the pity.

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.