Nvidia’s onto its newest generation of graphics cards, but its first two forays into the RTX 4000 line haven’t been as smooth as the graphics they render. We’ve already got the massive RTX 4090 and its only slightly more reasonable cousin, the RTX 4080 16GB, but this October saw Nvidia trot out an unusual term—unlaunch— to say it was taking the more budget-oriented RTX 4080 12GB (which was proposed to come with less performant specs at a lower cost) back to the drawing board.
It wasn’t strictly canceled, and now we know why. Nvidia’s trotting out the card again under a new name. The RTX 4070 Ti, announced during Nvidia’s special CES address on January 3rd, appears nearly identical to the 4080 12GB but is coming to us at a lower cost. At $799, rather than the $899 proposed for the 4080 12GB, the RTX 4070 Ti boasts 40 shader TFLOPs, 93 RT TFLOPs, and 641 Tensor TFLOPs. Those aren’t the most telling specs, but they’re all we have to go on for now. However, Nvidia’s promising up to 2 times the performance of the 3090 Ti, the flagship from its last generation of graphics cards, on demanding AAA games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
That’s in line with the promises it previously made for its “unlaunched” card, echoing the October announcement that the RTX 4080 12GB was “fantastic,” but “not named right.” Critics accused the 4080 12GB of simply being a 4070 rebrand, and with this announcement, those concerns appear to have been vindicated.
At any rate, gamers can get the 4070 Ti for $799 starting on January 5th.
For those with a more portable lifestyle, Nvidia’s also finally putting its new generation of mobile GPUs into laptops, with support for its DLSS 3 upscaling tech and options ranging from RTX 4050 to RTX 4090. It’s a bit odd to see laptop GPUs for cards that don’t have desktop counterparts yet, but not wholly surprising—laptop cards are so different that their namesakes often only bear spiritual resemblance to them.
We can expect details for laptops containing these cards to be coming from manufacturers like Dell and Asus shortly, but Nvidia did say that laptops containing the mobile versions of the RTX 4080 and 4090 will launch on February 8th for a starting price of $1,999.