Nvidia RTX 4070 ships - Good performance, but higher prices for the mid-range
[14:49 Fri,14.April 2023 by Rudi Schmidts]
Nvidia finally released a "mid-range" graphics card with new Ada architecture yesterday. However, with current entry-level prices starting at 659 Euros, one still feels somewhat reminded of the last crypto craze. Because a few years ago, current Nvidia GPUs "of the 70 series" only cost about half.
Nevertheless, it is primarily the performance that matters, and here the value looks even much better than we hunted it down in the mining heyday. Like the RTX 4070 Ti released in January, the new RTX 4070 offers a 192-bit locking interface that manages about 500 MB/s of data throughput with 12 GB of GDDR6X RAM. Compared to the 200 euro more expensive Ti variant, the new RTX 4070 only offers about 30 instead of 40 Tflops FP32 computing power, though. Thus, it should perform worse in video applications than an RTX 3080, which also "only" delivers 30 Tflops, but can boast with a much faster memory connection (760 GB/s).
The RTX 3080 is also still available with 10 GB starting at about 750 Euros and can be found with 12 GB starting at about 860 Euros, which is about the same price as the RTX 4070 Ti, which also ships with 12 GB of memory.
Thus, you ultimately have the choice between more video performance with faster memory and less power consumption with a modern Ada architecture at the current prices. Whereby 10 GB vs. 12 GB memory should hardly matter for video editing under Resolve or Premiere.
The Nvidia RTX4070 calculates with about 30 FP32 flops and has a memory throughput of about 500 GB/s.
However, users do not seem to be urgently looking for a new RTX 4070 for other applications now. Compared to previous graphics card launches, availability of the new card remains very good. One can make a purchase decision with much more peace of mind in times like these.
;)