Nvidia RTX 4070

An RTX 3080 with benefits

-  DAVE JAMES

THE NVIDIA RTX 4070 is a $100 cheaper RTX 3080. That’s the easiest, but probably also the most facile, way to describe the green team’s new graphics card. This is the fourth entry in the notoriously expensive Ada generation of GPUs, and in standard metrics performs as well as the fourth-tier card from the Ampere lineup. On the face of it, it’s just a cheaper chip.

But it’s not just that. This smart new Nvidia card is also an RTX 3080 with benefits. This is the first of the Ada graphics cards to utilize the same GPU as the previous release, just with a little of the good stuff cut back to create a more affordable offering. That also means Nvidia is able to do something useful with any chip that fails to make the grade as an RTX 4070 Ti, which otherwise uses the full AD104 die, or a mobile RTX 4080.