Nvidia’s AD104 chip, the GPU for its high-end Lovelace graphics cards, which should be the engine of the RTX 4070, could end up being as powerful as the RTX 3090 Ti, according to the latest in the rumor mill.
This will be the maximum configuration of the AD104, which will reportedly have 7,680 CUDA cores and boost power to 400W, claims Kopite7kimi, a well-known Twitter-based leaker.
As I mentioned earlier, there is an AD104 SKU with a 400W limit. PG141-SKU331a AD104 full-fat with 7680FP3221Gbps 12G GDDR6XIt can easily match with RTX 3090 Ti.August 1, 2022
As you can see, the leaker’s expectation is that this fully released version of the AD104 will be compatible with Nvidia’s current most powerful consumer graphics card, the RTX 3090 Ti, and the suggestion is that it will ‘easily’ match the performance of that car. Ampere boss, which means we can see a slightly more powerful GPU here.
The vanilla RTX 4070 will be a scaled-down AD104, with Kopite7kimi previously saying it will use 7,168 CUDA cores with a power consumption of around 300W.
The full-fat variant, then, is considerably heavier with power, and therefore likely considerably faster (with those extra 512 cores too) – this should, in theory, be the RTX 4070 Ti (or whatever naming scheme that Nvidia chooses to use it for supercharged). versions of base models, such as the ‘Super’ moniker seen on the RTX 2000 generation).
Review: The Battle for Efficiency, Not Just Performance
Take all of this with a lot of skepticism, of course – it’s just a rumor, and it should be viewed with caution as with any conversation of this kind. Part of the reason for the extra power requirements for the 4070 Ti will be the supposed use of 12GB of GDDR6X, as opposed to 10GB of GDDR6 for the base 4070; and, no doubt, greatly boosting those clock speeds as well.
Still, for Nvidia to bump it up to 400W with the RTX 4070, even if it’s the Ti version of the card, it seems a bit overkill to us. As noted above, the vanilla 4070 is supposed to sit at 300W, and even the RTX 4080 (AD103) should consume around 420W (we say only meaning compared to this theoretical AD104).
So we’d take this as an indication that the RTX 4070 Ti (or whatever it’s called) will be relatively power-hungry and could go up to 400W. If it really hits a full 400W for a xx70 model, well, that wouldn’t be a good idea for Nvidia.
This is also another hint that the battle for raw performance aside, AMD looks increasingly likely to be the winner when it comes to the energy efficiency of high-end GPUs. And that’s becoming more of a consideration for some people with rapidly rising electricity bills and the looming specter of more spiraling energy costs to come. Price/performance will be a key metric not only in terms of actual price but also with the ongoing running costs of a high-end graphics card…
Still, with all that said, there’s no denying a buzz of excitement surrounding the possibility of an RTX 4070 variant that might actually (only) outperform the RTX 3090 Ti.