PC enthusiasts and DIYers with the deepest pockets always get to try the latest and greatest GPUs first, with mass-market offerings arriving several months after the
halo products have been available. NVIDIA's
Ada Lovelace RTX 40 generation seems to be following this well trodden path, but we have got some new corroborating reports about the mid-range GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti to chew over, while we await official details.
According to
WCCF Tech's sources (add salt) both the upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti will be based upon variants of the NVIDIA AD104 GPU. This GPU is already making its presence felt in retail, as the new
GeForce RTX 4070 Ti with AD104-250 (providing 60 SMs, 7,680 CUDA cores) was released just last week. Of course, the lower-echelon GPUs will be using these same AD104 dies that didn't quite make the grade for RTX 4070 Ti products.
Specifically, the RTX 4070 uses the AD104-251 GPU which is rumored to have 46 active SMs and 5,888 CUDA cores. Despite having approximately a quarter fewer CUDA cores at its disposal, enthusiasts shopping within the mid-range should probably be grateful that the memory subsystem appears to have been untouched. In other words, the GeForce RTX 4070 appears to have the same 12GB of 21Gbps memory on a 192-bit bus, as the recently released RTX 4070 Ti.
Moving down the power, price, and performance ladder to the RTX 4060 Ti, and we can see that this card is expected to be marketed with 57% fewer CUDA cores than the
RTX 4070 Ti. Sadly, we don't have any new info about the memory subsystem of the RTX 4060 Ti. Additionally, the new information offers no hints regarding GPU clock speeds for the RTX 4070 or RTX 4060 Ti. TBP figures look vague too, with both the RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti projected to consume something in the region of 200W (subject to change) when gaming. WCCF Tech's sources suggest these ~200W cards will still feature the 12VHPWR (16-pin) power connector.
On the topic of timescale, the new rumors suggest that the AD104-251 and AD104-250 GPUs will hit production in Feb and March, respectively. Even so, the story goes that these highly anticipated GPUs probably won't be on shelves in graphics cards until after Computex 2023 (end of May / early June). If this timing information is true, it is disappointing news for the masses waiting for an irresistible new Ada Lovelace RTX '60' card.
Interestingly, NVIDIA has already revealed its intentions for the
RTX 40 Laptop series of GPUs at CES 2023, probably under pressure from the financial weight of its laptop making partners. You can read about these powerful new mobile GPUs and their specs in our report from the NVIDIA keynote at
CES 2023, last week.