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Nvidia Announces the RTX 4070, a 'Somewhat Reasonably Priced Desktop GPU' (polygon.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 4070 desktop GPU, a move that anyone who's been putting off a new midrange DIY PC build has likely been eagerly awaiting. It puts the company's impressive Ada Lovelace graphics architecture within grasp for people who don't want to spend $1,000 or more on a huge graphics card. From a report: It'll launch Thursday, April 13, starting at $599 for Nvidia's Founders Edition single-fan model. As is always the case, other manufacturers like Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI, and others are putting out factory overclocked variants, too. The Verge already has a full review up for the RTX 4070.

The RTX 4070 Founders Edition card requires a 650 W power supply, and it connects via two PCIe 8-pin cables (an adapter comes in the box). Alternatively, it can connect via a PCIe Gen 5 cable that supports 300 W or higher. The RTX 4070 won't require a humongous case, as it's a two-slot card that's quite a bit smaller than the RTX 4080. It's 9.6 inches long and 4.4 inches wide, which is just about the same size as my RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition card. Despite being a lower-end GPU compared to Nvidia's RTX 4080 or RTX 4090, it retains the DLSS 3 marquee selling point. It's the next iteration of Nvidia's upscaling technique that drops the render resolution to make games run better, then uses the GPU's AI cores to intelligently upscale what you see.
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Nvidia Announces the RTX 4070, a 'Somewhat Reasonably Priced Desktop GPU' More

Nvidia Announces the RTX 4070, a 'Somewhat Reasonably Priced Desktop GPU'

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  • Someone is out of touch here. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:30PM (#63444822) Homepage
    $599 is reasonable for a desktop GPU? Someone is clearly out of touch with reality and I don't think it is me.

    I mean that's like 100 dozen eggs. Sooo reasonable.

    • It wasn't that long ago that $600 was the absolute top of the line money is no object GPU. $300 was a "mid range" GPU, and $100-200 was entry level. It seems like GPUs are one of the only computer components that have managed to increase in price faster than inflation.

      I've been waiting for about a decade for $500 GPU that can run games in 4K with max settings. Since this is marketed as a 1440p GPU, I guess I'll just have to keep on waiting.

      • "Top of the line" and "max settings" are both arbitrary and moving targets that reflect only what others are willing to spend, not a lack of progress in any absolute sense.
      • AMD cards are really hit or miss. I ran an RX 580 for 2 years with exactly 1 issue in Far Cry 3 fixed in 2 driver updates only to run into constant crashes after upgrading to a Ryzen 5600 CPU of all things (likely because of Microsoft Windows Update stomping on my drivers, but that didn't make the card any more usable...). Intel is promising but has a long way to go.

        Right now if you want to game you either roll the dice and see if you win with AMD/Intel or you pony up for Nvidia. This is largely due to

      • Re:Someone is out of touch here. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by slaker ( 53818 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @04:03PM (#63444942)

        That's always going to be a moving target, at least until the standard for eye candy shifts to 8k etc.

        I'm not a big gamer and in fact my needs as a content creator are best served with Intel Arc cards, but to the extent that I do fire up games, I've found that I get a perfectly gratifying experience gaming in a window on my primary display so that I can continue to see and use the other screens on my workstation.

        The truth is that PC gaming isn't allowed to greatly surpass whatever consoles are doing in the way that it used to. Companies with the budgets to make the titles with the greatest technical demands are going to target Playstaton and Xbox before they even think about whatever a top end PC GPU can handle on top of the dedicated game systems. At best, maybe the PC will get a longer draw distance or support to run across multiple displays or something. It's hard to get excited about that IMO.

        My guess is that everything that could reasonably be called a "Gaming" GPU from the current Ada lineup will wind up somewhere north of $450.

        (The reason I went with Arc? It supports hardware h.265 10-bit 422 color, which is what natively comes out of almost all mirrorless cameras. Even though this has been the case for years, nVidia and AMD only support h.265 4.2.0 in hardware. Editing video is a lot easier when I don't have to transcode my camera output before I ever do anything with it.)

        • I think it hit a steady point then they introduced RTX with raytracing demos and that inspired a lot of people to upgrade even if it wasn't necessary. I saw the demos and immediately thought it looked like someone remastering Star Wars to make it more shiny and with added lens flare.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )

          The truth is that PC gaming isn't allowed to greatly surpass whatever consoles are doing in the way that it used to. Companies with the budgets to make the titles with the greatest technical demands are going to target Playstaton and Xbox before they even think about whatever a top end PC GPU can handle on top of the dedicated game systems. At best, maybe the PC will get a longer draw distance or support to run across multiple displays or something. It's hard to get excited about that IMO.

          It's much simpler than that. GPUs are pretty mature now. We don't get radical advances very often anymore, it's usually just performance increases in each new generation, with improvements that change how you make games being rare. We're long past the days when PC GPUs had shaders and consoles didn't. That's a big part of it.

          Another big part is PlayStation and Xbox are basically gaming PCs. They're AMD CPUs with Radeon graphics. You even program an Xbox with the same APIs you program a PC game. Consoles don

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Nvidia seem to be hoping that people with GTX 1070s and 1080s will finally upgrade to a 4070 with this "reasonable" pricing.

          The problem is that if you only play at 1080p60 and can live without stuff like ray tracing eye-candy, there really isn't much reason to upgrade. That's why there is such a push for things like 240Hz gaming monitors and higher resolutions.

          • The problem is that if you only play at 1080p60 and can live without stuff like ray tracing eye-candy, there really isn't much reason to upgrade.

            inflated vram requirements may come for you, even at 1080p without RT.

        • The sad thing is these card don't even have comparable specs to the consoles. The PS5 has 16 GB of VRAM and 512 MB DDR4 for the OS while this card only has 12 GB which is a total deal breaker for me. I can't justify buying a card with less than 16 GB.

          • The ps5 has 16 GB of RAM total. That's shared between the GPU, OS, and game code and data. So, while they might allocate more than 8GB (which is a common amount of VRAM on many PC GPUs) for the GPU data you can be sure it's less than 16 GB.
            OTOH, even today, the "ultra" settings in many games in PCs are higher than what's used in current gen consoles. That could be a reason why you might need a GPU with 12 or 16 GB of RAM to run things at 4k/ultra on PCs not because current gen consoles have 16 GB of VRAM j

      • I've been waiting for about a decade for $500 GPU that can run games in 4K with max settings. Since this is marketed as a 1440p GPU, I guess I'll just have to keep on waiting.

        You got another decade to wait then.

        • Indeed. It's one reason why VR isn't going to catch into the mainstream soon. You need 4K to drive the top end VR headsets like the HTC Vive Pro 2, and you really need 4K (or better) to meet the promise of VR. Most people (myself included) aren't ready to plunk down $2k for Vive Pro 2 and a card that can drive it well (in addition to having an otherwise capable PC).

          • That, and there is no good software for it.

            • Well there's every flight and racing simulator. HL Alyx. Maybe Lone Echo?

              • Neither genre I care for since they are filled with microtransactions.
                Alyx is neat, but I am not paying the money needed for VR for 1 game.
                No thanks to adventure games. I don't find the genres need for pixel hunting and nonsense puzzle all that fun.
                Beat Sabre sounds like fun. For about 5 minutes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "It seems like GPUs are one of the only computer components that have managed to increase in price faster than inflation."

        It's all relative I suppose. If you consider that the cost is really in the amount of wafer you get apples to apples would be all the gain that could be packed in the same amount of wafer at the same price tier the inflation of price is actually WAY beyond inflation for many core components.

      • It seems like GPUs are one of the only computer components that have managed to increase in price faster than inflation.

        Funny you mention inflation. The 3DFX Voodoo launch price was $580 in inflation adjusted terms. And you still had to buy a display adapter to go with it since it didn't do 2D.

        I've been waiting for about a decade for $500 GPU that can run games in 4K with max settings.

        You will never get that. 4K is a lot of pixels to fill, and with greater processing power comes greater graphics quality. You can make a choice: drop your settings, or buy an absolute top of the line card for that top of the line performance.

        I won't be taking my little $12000 hatchback to a racetrack either.

        • Bullshit. Voodoo 1 launch price was $299. Don't make shit up.

          https://www.techpowerup.com/gp... [techpowerup.com]

        • The original Voodoo was also a very high end product for its day. Graphics accelerators were a new thing back then. I'm thinking more like the first half of the 00s, when the graphics market card was already mature.

          Anyhow, regarding your hatchback: it may surprise you to learn that the most popular racing series in the U.S. is spec Miata. A fully prepped spec Miata can easily be had for around $10k. Small lightweight hatchbacks are not a rare sight on racetracks either.

      • Dude like almost 20 years ago i bought a high end raedon x850 xt gpu for $500 and I thought that price was absolutely ridiculous back then.
    • For some people, it is for low values of "reasonable" in that it was not over $1000

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Not really, that has been the benchmark price point for a gaming system for some time. Everything beyond that is for early adopters who don't mind buying unreliable hardware with performance stats that probably can't be realized due to other bottlenecks. The same people who buy a Ferrari over a Tesla. They aren't paying for value so you don't give them value.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by quall ( 1441799 )

      I see your point, but at the same time people are paying 1000 for a phone that they mostly just use to text and browse the internet.

      So it's reasonably if people are paying those prices for cards. I doubt that Nvidia is not out of touch. I suspect that they know exactly what they are doing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "I doubt that Nvidia is not out of touch. I suspect that they know exactly what they are doing."

        Yeah, they are letting their competition catch up and doing everything they can to avoid appearing like they took any sort of hit from the decline of gpu mining.

    • "Somewhat reasonable" is a subset of "not reasonable".

      It's mostly overkill. A lot of people though really want their 4K high refresh gaming monitors at 120fps. My cutoff point is $299.99 only because that card might last me 5-8 year, but even then I look for cheaper. Last one I got was last year was less than that, the other offerings from the vendor were all RTX which is overkill. You don't need raytracing capabilities in a game.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      You're not wrong. I recommend going with a higher end previous gen card that was used for mining. People are dumb, they think mining cards are 'worn out' like something with mechanical parts. Others think the heat degrades them... actually temperature variation has a far bigger impact than heat if the heat is within tolerance and mining rigs have virtually no variation in operation. Most of them are even underclocked a bit because the hashes/watt worked out better. Just be prepared to reflash back to a stoc

    • $599 is reasonable for a desktop GPU? Someone is clearly out of touch with reality and I don't think it is me.

      It's not a desktop GPU. It's a gaming PC GPU. Your desktop doesn't need a GPU, if you're just using a desktop application there's an iGPU in most CPUs.

      How unreasonable is $599? Let's check an inflation calculator:
      3dfx Voodoo launch price: $580 at launch.
      The Voodoo2 was cheaper at $560 at launch.
      And worth remembering for both of those cards you still needed to buy a display adapter too since they were only graphics accelerators.

      So not only is $599 not unreasonable, it's literally what GPUs were priced at sin

      • Except that the 3dfx voodoo was top of the line back then, when it was priced $580 (adjusted to inflation I guess). The 4070 is not top of the line though, the 4090ti is, and that one is selling for 2000$.

        I agree with you with everything else though:
        - you don't need a GPU for a desktop PC. iGPU are very good at that, and most of them can even allow casual play at low to mid settings
        - even for a gaming PC, previous generations GPUs provide far enough performance. Yes you might not be able to enable RTX, but

      • When the voodoo1/2 were released they were unparalleled, top graphics chip available. Today's "4070" is 2 chips smaller than the largest, and 3 down from the top SKU.

        You can go back as far as 2005 while the vendors had segmented chip options to see that the then $600 top spec 7800gtx would be under $1000 in todays money, so well below the $1600 that nvidia wants for the 4090. They only did two chips, but the 7600gt was merely $200 then.

        It's pretty clear that nvidia has doubled the entry level chip price e

      • Computers used to be thousands of dollars not including a monitor. I even bought a few, but economies of scale and everything becoming a commodity throws that inflation adjustment out the window.

        Everything kept getting cheaper (I am speaking cost here), and for over a decade, maybe two, the reasonably priced competent gaming graphics cards were always in the under 200 dollar range. Personally I tried to stay in the 100 - 120 range (a generation or so behind to reach that price) and it worked until all he

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edwdig ( 47888 )

        Try comparing things that are more similar. The RTX 4070 is an upper mid range GPU. The Voodoo was a top of the line enthusiast GPU.

        I bought a GeForce GTX 1060 in 2017 for $209.99. The RTX 3060 today costs about $350. The RTX 4060 should be coming out soon, and is rumored to cost $500, which would keep it in line with the price increases seen on all the other 40xx series GPUs vs the 30xx series GPUs.

        Nvidia has had a very consistent product line for a long time time, so it's pretty easy to compare products a

        • The RTX 4070 is an upper mid range GPU. The Voodoo was a top of the line enthusiast GPU.

          The voodoo cards existed in an immature market. There were a ton of competitors (I tried several of them, including PowerVR and Permedia 2) and they "all" used different APIs — aside from Oxygen and Permedia, which both used OpenGL, everything else out there was weird.) It's really too bad 3dfx didn't go with MiniGL from the start, because we might have avoided Direct3D.

      • Stop lying the Voodoo launch price was $299.

        https://www.techpowerup.com/gp... [techpowerup.com]

    • When a tech column starts using non tech terms like âoesomewhatâ we are entering a vague nebula gas cloud into muddy waters, slippery slopes, and black ice. Regular journalists can start using grammarly,whatever

    • If I compare this to the price of a hamburger today vs. a few years ago, it's more like a $299 desktop GPU.

    • Geeze, I remember back in the day (like 15 years ago) when $300 was considered high end for a GPU.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I could buy a decent new PC for that price!

    • Well, no... yes... kinda...

      Desktop GPUs, i.e., GPUs you use in your office PCs, have pretty much vanished. The CPU is now good enough again for that job, just like it was about 30 years ago when a GPU was called a graphics adapter because it was one. The processing was done in the CPU. We outsourced this to a subprocessor that grew in power and with it grew its tasks, now it pretty much is responsible for translating object definitions into graphics (aka "rendering"), management of physics of those objects,

  • it's price gouging because of weak market competition, which itself is due to a wide array of anti-trust infractions that are not enforced.

    Weak regulation and law enforcement of white collar crimes affects your everyday life. Remember that when you're gaming at 30fps @ 720p.
    • Nope, I spent the $400 for 1440p at 120fps
    • Actually they ought to worry about the competition, AMD seems to be back in the game. The other day, someone published a nice performance per $ chart of the more recent cards. Turns out that the 30xx series is pretty good value, the 40xx not so much, especially compared to similar AMD cards. The 4090 is the exception, being rather expensive but delivering on performance. Especially here in Europe where we generally get screwed on the prices even harder, and have to pay VAT on top... the 4090 costs more

      • Performance isn't the concern, the AMD GPUs have now and and again been as fast or even slightly faster, but they've never had higher quality drivers. As well, CUDA is far and away the dominant API for GPU acceleration in general. Many things now support OpenCL, but almost everything works with CUDA. IME the quality of AMD video driver has improved a lot more on Linux than on Windows, but nvidia is still a more practical choice. Recent Linux drivers are giving me very good performance even for my poor old 1

    • You might have an argument if reasonably priced cards didn't exist. I bought a Radeon 6600XT for around $250 that provides good performance in all the games I play, and has enough VRAM to play around with some basic AI stuff.

      • AMD doesn't have the ray tracing performance that nVidia has, that's what's keeping me from getting a 6950xt. I care about RT performance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calibax ( 151875 )

      If Nvidia is price gouging why are their gross profit margins about the same as other semiconductor companies?

      • Crappy management? Cross financing some black hole projects?

        I've worked for companies in markets where no sane person could NOT produce a profit, but somehow they did...

  • SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:38PM (#63444852)
    That is NOT a reasonable price for a graphics card!

    Prices went up because some people wanted to spew the world's energy on doing pointless math, but someone needs to tell Nvidia and co that we have woken up, those days are long gone and graphic card prices need to reflect that.

    • Re:SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by quall ( 1441799 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:56PM (#63444924)

      People talk with their money, and as long as profits remain high then the pricing will be too. If they can make more money by selling less products at higher prices, then they will do that. They will only drop pricing after profits start to dwindle.

    • That is NOT a reasonable price for a graphics card!

      In inflation adjusted terms the 3DFX Voodoo was $580 at launch and still needed a display adapter. But here's the thing: you don't need an RTX4070.

      You're complaining that Ferraris are unreasonably expensive as your daily driver. You can play any game on the market perfectly performantly with a card several generations back.

      but someone needs to tell Nvidia and co that we have woken up

      Really? Because it sounds like you're complaining about something you don't need being priced out of your price range. No one needs to tell Nvidia anything, aside from a single product th

      • We aren't complaining as much about the price but more about the reporter that thinks the price is reasonable for a 'desktop GPU'.

        • Except it is perfectly reasonable. Just like how $150k is perfectly reasonable for a racing car.

          You don't need a dedicated GPU if you don't play high end games. If you do, then it's perfectly reasonable to expect to pay good money for something high end.

          • Except the GTX4070 is hardly high end. You'd be paying about 3x as much for the high end stuff now.

            And before you drag out the 3DFX Voodoo again, that was the high end when it came out.

  • Mist as well get PS5 or Xbox (Score:3)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:43PM (#63444876)
    $600 is more than a PS5 or latest Xbox. The high cost of even mid-range cards is killing PC gaming. Nvidia had a huge boom from crypto mining and work from home where everyone needed to buy new equipment, but they are in for a rude awakening when no one buys these at this price.

    • I wonder why they demand a 650W power supply. I actually have one, but my MB+CPU draws under 100W... I was running SLI when I bought this supply, but it was fine with a 460W and this was just the cheapest thing with good efficiency. TDP on this card is only supposed to be 200W, the 1070 is 150W for comparison.

      • The TDP is more about the thermals, but these GPUs are very spikey. Several short spikes in power draw won't raise the temperature very much but the PSU still has to deliver the current.

      • They always put the worst case requirements for power supplies because you never know what kind of quality and safety margins people will have, not to mention any other crap hooked up to the PC.

      • TDP and peak consumption are not the same thing. Heck TDP isn't even a number that can be trusted for thermal performance these days due to manufacturers gaming the definition to the point of making it utterly meaningless.

        You don't size a powersupply for averages. If you did you would have a 5A service fuse in your house, and blow the fuse every time you turn the coffee machine on.

    • That's exactly what I did. I always thought of myself as more of a PC gamer, but I bought a Series X last year for Christmas and have really enjoyed it. I can't imagine playing a competitive multiplayer shooter on XBox, but otherwise games play great and look great. The best feature isn't even the 4K graphics, it's the lightning fast load times. As a father of a young child, quick resume is probably the most important video game feature to come out since 3D graphics.

    • $600 is more than a PS5 or latest Xbox. The high cost of even mid-range cards is killing PC gaming. Nvidia had a huge boom from crypto mining and work from home where everyone needed to buy new equipment, but they are in for a rude awakening when no one buys these at this price.

      If demand for the new cards drops, then the prices will also drop. The reason that prices don't drop is that there is demand, even at the higher prices. Yes, you and I may not be willing to pay the higher prices, but we also wouldn't be willing to pay $800 for a phone either, and yet the high-end phone market continues to plug ahead.

      It's the right thing for consumers to demand better quality for lower prices, but it's also the right thing for vendors to push prices as high as the market will bear. The ma

    • $600 is more than a PS5 or latest Xbox.

      If you're poor and money is the only objective then sure. If not then you may consider the practical differences between a games console and a PC to be worth actually considering more than just dollars. And when you do so you may find yourself owning both a gaming PC with a high end GPU *and* a PS5 or latest Xbox.

  • For $600, I want a fully functional PC.

    • Microsoft should sell an Xbox PC that dual boots Win11 in all its spyware glory.

    • Then buy one. There are tons at that price range.

    • You can get one. You just can't get a high performance gaming PC with accelerated AV1 encoding and raytracing capabilities.

    • For $600, I want a fully functional PC.

      You can buy those today. Just don't expect a fully functional *gaming* PC for $600.

      • You guys don't get it, this card is $600 and requires 650W power. That's a PC. Just add some i/o.

        • Just add a mainboard for about 150 and a CPU for about as much and you're set.

          Frankly, when the GPU of a computer costs more than the rest of the components combined, you know something is amiss. Back in the days of yore before GPUs were a thing and VGA was new, we could accept that the CPU, being the central processing unit, of the system being the (by far) most expensive part of it.

          But a thing that just puts a picture out? Get real.

          • Just add a mainboard for about 150 and a CPU for about as much and you're set.

            Frankly, when the GPU of a computer costs more than the rest of the components combined, you know something is amiss. Back in the days of yore before GPUs were a thing and VGA was new, we could accept that the CPU, being the central processing unit, of the system being the (by far) most expensive part of it.

            But a thing that just puts a picture out? Get real.

            Graphics are just a little more advanced today than they were before GPUs and VGA graphics. The GPU does a lot more than "put a picture out" these days. Some games I play have the CPU at 3-5% (and a midrange CPU at that) while the GPU is at 100%. The GPU is doing the lion's share of the work with a lot of games.

        • This card only has a TDP of 200W. nvidia is just demanding you have a 650W power supply, probably on the assumption that you've got an intel CPU :)

  • I'm happy with my 1050. I'll just wait 10 years for something affordable or something from a different company.

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