Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti, the rumored imminent graphics card that will be Lovelace’s third offering, has seen a definite spill — and the takeaway is that it’s identical to the canceled RTX 4080 12GB.
Claimed specs highlighted by Cards video (Opens in a new tab) And it comes directly from the card’s manufacturer, Color who has featured the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe on their website. Although the product page has now been removed, it showed most of the BattleAx card’s specs, as well as images as well.
The graphics card is black with red edges but looks fairly simple otherwise, and it uses the same cooler as the RTX 4080 16GB – which is telling in terms of similarity to the backward 12GB version of the 4080.
Moreover, as mentioned at the beginning, the specifications provided are identical. The Color RTX 4070 Ti runs at the same clock speed as the 12GB 4080 (2310MHz base clock) and has 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM with a 192-bit memory bus. TDP is listed at 285W, again just like the lower-end canceled 4080 (and, of course, the 4070 Ti uses the same GPU as well — the AD104).
Analysis: Nvidia is in a tough pricing area
While this leak looks pretty solid – coming from a real card maker, complete with a set of RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe images – we still have some qualms about the specs provided. There is a possibility that whoever brought up the product page made a mistake – the page itself seems to have been a coincidence, or rather, multiple errors (across multiple spec points), but that doesn’t seem very likely.
Anyway, if we take this leak at face value, what does it tell us? It looks like Nvidia is relaunching the RTX 4080 12GB as the RTX 4070 Ti, and while we knew this was getting close to a point, we expected some minor tweaks to differentiate the models (like slightly tweaked clocks, perhaps). This appears to be the case in file Literal Re-launch the exact same card.
A key part of the spec is missing though, the CUDA core count. The AD104 was realized as a full-fat version with 7680 cores in the 4080 12GB, so we don’t know for sure if that’s the case for the RTX 4070 Ti.
There’s still the possibility that Nvidia will differentiate the 4070 Ti with a slightly shortened 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 somewhat from the $899 that the lower-tier 4080 was thrown at. The risk is that if Nvidia discloses what Seemingly the same graphics card for a hundred dollars less – or maybe even cheaper – it begs the question why was the 4080 12GB so high, then?
However, the rumor mill firmly believes the 4070 Ti will run the full 7,680 CUDA cores, and if it’s indeed a match for the 12GB 4080, how does Nvidia justify the price drop? Paying the 4070 Ti at $899 (as one card in all but name) certainly wouldn’t be an option, especially given Nvidia’s unpopularity due to current prices for Lovelace GPUs, the RTX 4080 16GB in particular.
This is just speculation, but here’s where another rumor comes into play. Presumably Nvidia will consider lowering the price of the RTX 4080 16GB, in response to declining sales (certainly compared to the RTX 4090) and to boost its overall popularity levels, perhaps — no doubt in combat against the upcoming launch of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, too. And if the price of the 4080 16GB drops significantly, that gives Nvidia an excuse to get the RTX 4070 Ti at a lower price point, even if it’s the same spec—because the 4080 12GB’s pegged launch price just wouldn’t be right (with the cheaper 16GB model).
We’ll see, but one thing this view of the RTX 4070 Ti offers in a listing with photos is another solid hint that the launch is close enough, that it’s ready to go with their website stuff, and apparently jumping the gun a little bit here. The rumor mill believes the 4070 Ti is set to debut on January 5th, and that’s been the theory for a while now.
