AMD could have Nvidia scared enough to revive the RTX 4080... as the RTX 4070 Ti

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti, the rumored-to-be-imminent graphics card that’ll be the third Lovelace offering, has witnessed a spec spillage – and the apparent takeaway is that it’s identical to the canceled RTX 4080 12GB.

The purported specs were highlighted by VideoCardz and come direct from a card manufacturer, namely Colorful which aired the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe on its website. Although the product page has now been yanked down, it showed most of the specs of the BattleAx card, as well as images too.

The graphics card is black with red trim but looks fairly plain otherwise, and it employs the same cooler as the RTX 4080 16GB – which is telling in terms of the resemblance to the ditched 12GB version of the 4080.

Moreover, as we mentioned at the outset, the specs provided are identical. The Colorful RTX 4070 Ti runs with the same clock speed as the ‘unlaunched’ 4080 12GB (2310MHz base clock) and has 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM with a 192-bit memory bus. TDP is listed at 285W, again just the same as the canceled lower-tier 4080 (and of course, the 4070 Ti uses the same GPU too - the AD104).

Analysis: Nvidia is in some tricky pricing territory

While this leak seems pretty solid – coming from an actual card maker, complete with a host of images of the RTX 4070 Ti BattleAx Deluxe – we should still exercise a little trepidation around the specs provided.  There’s a chance that whoever put up the product page could have made a mistake – the page itself going up seems to have been an accident, after all – or rather, several mistakes (across multiple spec points), but that doesn’t seem very likely.

At any rate, taking this leak at face value, what does it tell us? That Nvidia appears to be relaunching the RTX 4080 12GB as the RTX 4070 Ti, and while we knew this was coming to a point, we expected some slight tweaks to differentiate the models (like clocks tuned down a bit, perhaps). It appears to be the case that this is a literal relaunch of the exact same card.

Although that said, one key part of the spec is missing, and that’s the CUDA Core count. AD104 was realized as the full-fat version with all 7,680 cores in the 4080 12GB, so we don’t know for sure if that’ll be the case for the RTX 4070 Ti.

There remains the possibility that Nvidia will differentiate the 4070 Ti with a slightly cut-down amount of CUDA Cores. That way, Team Green can say ‘look, this card is different to that canceled 4080’, and that also justifies Nvidia cutting the price somewhat from the $899 that lower-tier 4080 was pitched at. The danger is that if Nvidia reveals what appears to be the same graphics card at a hundred bucks less – or maybe even cheaper – it begs the question why was the 4080 12GB priced so high, then?

However, the rumor mill firmly believes that the 4070 Ti will run with the full 7,680 CUDA Cores, and if it actually is identical to the 4080 12GB, then how does Nvidia justify a price drop? Because pushing out the 4070 Ti at $899 (as the same card in all but name) will surely not be an option, particularly given Nvidia’s unpopularity due to the existing pricing of Lovelace GPUs, and the RTX 4080 16GB in particular.

This is just speculation, but here’s where another rumor potentially comes into play. Nvidia is supposedly mulling a price cut for the RTX 4080 16GB, in response to ailing sales (certainly compared to the RTX 4090) and to boost its popularity levels in general, perhaps – and doubtless to combat the incoming launch of RDNA 3 GPUs from AMD, too. And if that 4080 16GB price drops substantially, that gives Nvidia a justification to have the RTX 4070 Ti at a lower price point, even if it’s the same spec – because the launch price pinned to the 4080 12GB would be no longer relevant (with the 16GB model being cheaper).

We shall see, but one thing this sighting of the RTX 4070 Ti in a listing with images does make for is another strong hint that the launch is near enough, what with Colorful seemingly ready to go with its website materials, and apparently jumping the gun a bit here. The rumor mill reckons that the 4070 Ti is set to debut on January 5, and that has been the theory for a while now.