Prices start at 669 euros. The graphics card will be available tomorrow and is a bit more economical than its predecessor.

Ever since the introduction of Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace cards, creative professionals have been saddened by what such a card costs more compared to before. The RTX 4090 was toying with the $2,000 mark and the RTX 4080 was well over $1,000. With the RTX 4070 Ti we fell just below this limit, but only the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 has an almost realistic price from 669 euros for the first time since the crypto craze. All of the above prices include the statutory value-added tax.

Ada Lovelace offers gamers plenty of goodies including DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation, but for creative professionals, only hardware acceleration for AV1 video encoding is an important benefit. Everything else has to come from the raw processing power of the card, for example to edit and export 4K videos faster.

That’s where the shoe pinches with the RTX 4070. Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 3070, you get the same number of CUDA cores. The boost clock is noticeably higher, but you get a bigger bottleneck in terms of memory bandwidth. Thankfully, the lousy 8GB of GDDR6 in the RTX 3070 gives way to a more capacious 12GB of GDDR6X. We would have preferred 16 GB as with the RTX 4080, but unfortunately Nvidia is known for being very economical with extra video memory.

Small jump forward

In fact, the RTX 4070 is a lightweight variant of the current RTX 4070 Ti. The card is pretty much the same aside from the number of CUDA cores and a slightly higher boost clock speed.

Compared to the RTX 3070, there’s a good chance the RTX 4070 will be significantly more power efficient. The TDP is 200 watts, slightly less than the RTX 3070, but the Ada Lovelace architecture is very efficient.

Anyone who expected a giant step forward, as with the RTX 4090, has come home from a boring journey. The RTX 4070 is a minimal upgrade for creative professionals compared to the RTX 3070. The price is slightly higher than its predecessor at launch.

The artificial inflating of prices during the crypto craze has distorted everything and everything is yet to recover. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 bears the consequences, because with large stocks of the RTX 3070 in retail, a sharp asking price is not possible today. The fact that it is the cheapest of all Ada Lovelace tickets so far is only a small plaster on the wound.