A GeForce RTX 4070 was a conspicuous no-show during Nvidia’s GPU announcement yesterday. However, the company plans on releasing one—along with lower-end RTX 4000 models—in the near future once it begins ramping up production.
“We don’t have everything ready to roll out at one time,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a Q&A with journalists on Wednesday. “What we have ready is 4090 and 4080. But over time, we’ll get other products in the lower-ends of the stack out to the market.”
The statement also signals that RTX 4000 GPUs will eventually arrive at more consumer-friendly price points. Currently, the most affordable product in the series is the 12GB GeForce RTX 4080, which lands in November at a starting price of $899.
The other two products, the 16GB RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090, start at $1,199 and $1,599, respectively, putting them out of reach for consumers hoping for a midrange PC graphics card.
Why Nvidia is ignoring the mid-tier and low-end market for now is "simple" and "not so complicated," Jensen said. "We usually start at the high end because that’s where the enthusiasts want a refresh first. And what we found is 4080, 4090 is a good place to start. And as soon as we can, we’ll move further down the stack," he said.
Still, Nvidia made the eyebrow-raising decision to sell two distinctly different RTX 4080 models, even though they share the same name. That’s because the 12GB model not only has less video memory, it also contains only 7,680 CUDA cores. The 16GB model, meanwhile, features a significantly higher CUDA core count at 9,728. Both models also use different GPU chips, powered by the company's Ada Lovelace architecture.
As a result, some critics claim the 12GB RTX 4080 is actually a 4070 model in disguise, but with a $400 price increase over the RTX 3070, which originally launched two years starting at $499.
However, Nvidia views things differently. Company executives said in a separate Q&A with journalists that the RTX 4080 12GB model is a “high-performance GPU” that can beat the performance of an older RTX 3080 12GB card by three times.
“We really think that it’s deserving of a 80-class product. That’s really why it’s named that way,” an exec says. In other words, Nvidia is reserving the RTX 4070 for a lower-powered GPU.
Nvidia is also facing an oversupply situation with its older RTX 3000 series. GPU demand has fallen to the point that retailers are slashing prices to help sell existing inventory. So it's possible Nvidia is waiting for its existing supplies to clear before releasing an RTX 4070 and other lower-end models. Otherwise any remaining inventory for the RTX 3000 cards could fail to budge.
Nvidia’s CEO added: “I’m hoping by Q4 time frame, sometime in Q4, that the (sales) channel would have normalized, and it would have made room for a great launch for Ada.”