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With the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, could massive GPUs finally be put to rest? I really do!

With the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, could massive GPUs finally be put to rest? I really do!

A recent rumour says the GPU chip used in the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will be 30% smaller than the chip used in the previous-gen RTX 3070 Ti and 50% smaller than the AD102 chip used in the RTX 4090. This chip was originally intended for usage in the RTX 4080 12GB.

A Twitter account, has revealed this by tweeting a photo of the 296mm2 AD104 chip. The RTX 4070 Ti, which will replace the discontinued RTX 4080 12GB, will reportedly ship in early January with a price tag of 899 and include the AD104 CPU combined with 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

This is still an extremely high cost, especially when compared to the maximum price of AMD’s top-of-the-line RX 7000 graphics cards at 999. Differences in renderer performance are rather large between the RTX 4090 (which employs the AD102) and the rumoured RTX 4070 Ti (which will employ an AD104 processor).

The RTX 4090, for instance, has 18432 shader units, which is the standard for modern high-end graphics cards. The RTX 4070 Ti, on the other hand, has just 7680 shader units, which is less than half as many as the RTX 4090, and yet this huge discrepancy in hardware specifications is not reflected in the costs of the GPUs.

Miniature cards are great, and inexpensive ones are even better

The RTX 4070 Ti, if the rumours are genuine, may be a godsend for those putting together compact PCs. The RTX 40 series has been criticised for its expensive price, but the physically large size of the currently available GPUs has also been a point of contention.

This is believed as a contributing factor to the current cable-melting scandal in which Nvidia is entangled, since it requires users to bend the power cable at ludicrous angles to make it fit against the side panels of their cases.

Because of the smaller GPU chip, we should expect to see some twin-fan variants, in contrast to the nearly uniformly triple-fan RTX 4080 and 4090 cards from third-party vendors. This is a great improvement; the AD104 consumes just 300W at most, far less than the AD102, the previous state-of-the-art model.

However, if the RTX 4070 Ti’s performance and pricing are not represented in a consumer-friendly fashion, all the hassle that came with ‘unlaunching’ and rebranding the product would appear a bit meaningless. Smaller form factors won’t save this new GPU from being unrecommendable if it releases at the original MSRP of 899.