Nvidia RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 rumors suggest we’re still a while away from the real launch
Proving that Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards don’t seem far from an actual release, the specs of the rumored RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 have changed. again.
Now, obviously these aren’t final, confirmed GPU specs, just rumored chip numbers, but the fact that the specs of the two most important graphics cards across Nvidia’s next generation are still shaky suggests they’re still not being made properly.
Interestingly, it looks like Jen-Hsun gave and Jen-Hsun took, as the RTX 4070 is now reportedly getting 12GB of GDDR6X memory – instead of the 10GB originally rumored – and the RTX 4080 is slashing its CUDA core count.
Of course, it’s all based on tweets from chattering Twitter leaker Kopite7kimi, who’s been throwing numbers around like an overzealous bingo caller for the past year or so. In the past day or so, they’ve released updated GPU specs that will likely kick off the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme score.
I’d say the most interesting is the RTX 4070 rumour, which suggests that Nvidia has been hearing an unnecessary “moar memory” clamor from the rabid tech crowd unhappy with the prospect of only 10GB GDDR6 on a third-tier AD104 Lovelace GPU, and is Tossed them another few gigabytes of fast VRAM to keep them quiet.
Beyond that, however, the increase to a 192-bit bus is more popular, and it is said to now have a fast 21Gbps memory as well. However, if the latest leak is to be believed, it also gets more healthy CUDA cores. The previous spec had 7168 cores, while the new number is 7680.
There is an update for the RTX 4070. PG141-SKU3317680FP3212G 21Gbps GDDR6X300WTSE >11000August 4, 2022
However, the opposite has happened with the new potential RTX 4080 GPU, with the latest AD103 chip spec featuring 9,728 CUDA cores instead of the 10,240 previously promised.
This means that the RTX 4080 has 512 fewer cores, while the RTX 4070 has 512 more cores. This may be equivalent to four Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), although it may not have a huge impact on general rasterization performance. However, it may have an impact on ray tracing performance as you gain or lose another four RT cores in the mix.
I’m not a chatterbox, but I have to make some updates. I hope you do not mind. A possible RTX 4080, PG136/139-SKU360AD103-300-A19728FP32256bit 16G 21Gbps GDDR6X total power ~420WTSE~15000 Now I have done the latest update for 4090, 4080 and 4070.August 5, 2022
Still, the (probably not totally fabricated) Time Spy Extreme scores are enticing, however, putting the RTX 4070 on the same level as the RTX 3090 Ti, while the RTX 4080 is about 33% higher. This is a potential change in performance, in addition to the best of our previous generation.
But, you know, this all means it’s increasingly unlikely that we’ll see more than one RTX 40-series GPU this year, and it probably won’t be the one you’re looking for. We’ve spoken to insiders who say there may not be a massive rollout this year, in line with expectations that only the ultra-expensive, nearly unattainable RTX 4090 will be the only real new graphics card for the Green Team in 2022.
This is quite frustrating.