Nvidia Reportedly Prepping RTX 4070 Ti: Rebadged RTX 4080 12GB Makes a Comeback

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia will rebadge its cancelled GeForce RTX 4080 12GB graphics card to GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, according to a well-known leaker with good track record. The move is a logical one, but it now remains to be seen when exactly this Ada Lovelace product is set to hit the market, how much it will cost, and where it ranks among the best graphics cards.

When Nvidia formally announced its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB this September, it was a rather odd graphics card from the start. The board carried Nvidia's AD104 in its full configuration, featuring 7680 CUDA cores and a 192-bit memory interface. Despite its RTX 4080 model number, it was about 30% slower compared to the RTX 4080 16GB, according to Nvidia's own benchmark results.

Following severe criticism from the community, Nvidia cancelled the 4080 12GB without revealing the fate of the fully-fledged AD104 GPU. Apparently, the product will now be called the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, according to @kopite7kimi, who tends to have accurate information. However, he's not an official source so his information should be taken with a pinch of salt and perhaps a dash of pepper.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series Specifications

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Row 0 - Cell 0 GPUFP32 CUDA CoresMemory ConfigurationTBP
GeForce RTX 4090AD1021638424GB 384-bit 21 GT/s GDDR6X450W
GeForce RTX 4080AD103972816GB 256-bit 22.4 GT/s GDDR6X320W
GeForce RTX 4070 TiAD104768012GB 192-bit 21 GT/s GDDR6X285W
GeForce RTX 4070AD1047168 (?)10GB 160-bit GDDR6??

The RTX 4070 Ti seems to be a proper name for a product enabled by the AD104 in all of its glory, but the question of when Nvidia will roll it out remains. Typically, Ti-class products follow regular vanilla graphics cards as a refresh, but there are also cases where Nvidia has launched Ti and non-Ti parts concurrently (RTX 2080 Ti and 2080; RTX 3060 Ti). Most of the time, the Ti parts come later (for example, the 1080 Ti, 1070 Ti, 3090 Ti, 3080 Ti, and 3070 Ti).

Depending on what Nvidia decides to do, we could see RTX 4070 Ti and the vanilla RTX 4070 launch at the same time, or at least close together. But as we've seen from the unlaunching of the 4080 12GB, there's no clear rhyme or reason to how Nvidia will proceed.

It's a safe bet that the vanilla GeForce RTX 4070 won't use the full AD104 GPU, and there are rumors that it may even come with 10GB of memory featuring a 160-bit interface. Performance-wise, such a product should easily beat Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti and will likely match or even leave the RTX 3080-series models in its wake, but that might require some creative benchmarking (i.e., DLSS3).

While Nvidia presumably planned to release the RTX 4080 12GB this year, we don't know if the same holds for the rebadged RTX 4070 Ti, and we've widely suspected its RTX 4070 won't arrive until January 2023. It's possible the company will speed up the launch of its RTX 4070, or it may simply launch the Ti model ahead of the vanilla model. Both decisions have their pros and cons.

Launching a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti model at $899 this year and keeping the vanilla RTX 4070 model under wraps will enable Nvidia to meet its sales and average selling prices (ASPs) goals that it set when it announced the RTX 4080 12GB. However, given the impending AMD RX 7900 XT that's set to arrive on December 13, also priced at $899 but with apparently much better specs than AD104, we can't help but think the RTX 4070 Ti will have to come down in price.

Alternatively, launching a vanilla RTX 4070 ahead of the Ti model would allow Nvidia to undercut AMD's pricing while still leaving room for a higher tier offering. The MSRP of such a part will naturally be significantly lower than $899, which means lower ASPs for Nvidia.

We don't know which path Nvidia will take, or if it might even do something else entirely. We'll soon see how the RTX 4080 fares when it arrives next week and joins our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, at which point we'll need to wait for AMD's RDNA 3 launch in December to see where the cards fall. For now, the rebadging of the RTX 4080 12GB as the RTX 4070 Ti raises more questions than answers.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • hannibal
    Well.. As I expected 4070ti...
    But lets see, but it makes most sense. Faster than normal cut down 4070... And a price that actually is less than $1000. It will sell like hotcakes at $899 ;)
    O mores o tempora...


    ... Maybe triple the amount of AMD 7900XTX and 7900XT together? With 20% to 30% less speed! Marketing is wonderous thing!
    Reply
  • spentshells
    I feel like greed is finally going to cause an exodus to other brands... not many, but some share of the market is heading out the window... evga knows something we do not.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    'Potentially logical' move, my butt. It was all according to keikaku.

    Just one of many times a company tries something very scummy to see how The People react, apologize(in falsetto), and back down to something slightly less scummy with enough people being 'ok' with it.
    Either way, the company wins and the customer loses.

    spentshells said:
    I feel like greed is finally going to cause an exodus to other brands... not many, but some share of the market is heading out the window...
    Fewer folks taking interest in the PC or DIYPC space?
    Fewer folks buying top end gpus due to being priced out, compared to several years ago?
    Lower tech site traffic? Folks needing help troubleshooting their fancy new hardware, but not getting replies or waiting a day or more before getting any, due to dwindling interest/fewer people experienced with the same hardware available to provide assistance?
    Reply
  • artk2219
    Admin said:
    Nvidia is reportedly preparing the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti for launch, a full AD104 implementation that carries the legacy of the "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB. How will it stack up to the other upcoming graphics cards?

    Nvidia Reportedly Prepping RTX 4070 Ti: Rebadged RTX 4080 12GB Makes a Comeback : Read more
    4070 ti is a bit generous, maybe 4060 ti, it seems like theyre leaving a huge performance gulf between the 4070's and 4080 now. Eh, I guess its on par with how they treated the 3000 series, still we'll see how they stack up the AMD's RX 7000 series.
    Reply
  • spentshells
    Phaaze88 said:
    'Potentially logical' move, my butt. It was all according to keikaku.

    Just one of many times a company tries something very scummy to see how The People react, apologize(in falsetto), and back down to something slightly less scummy with enough people being 'ok' with it.
    Either way, the company wins and the customer loses.


    Fewer folks taking interest in the PC or DIYPC space?
    Fewer folks buying top end gpus due to being priced out, compared to several years ago?
    Lower tech site traffic? Folks needing help troubleshooting their fancy new hardware, but not getting replies or waiting a day or more before getting any, due to dwindling interest/fewer people experienced with the same hardware available to provide assistance?
    I was going for brand loyalty.
    Some are gonna move to amd on the high end is what I was inferring.

    At this point I really figured with all the consoles running amd at this time I'm surprised they haven't gained more than they have... personally I blame bitcoin/ethereum
    Reply
  • artk2219
    Phaaze88 said:
    'Potentially logical' move, my butt. It was all according to keikaku.

    Just one of many times a company tries something very scummy to see how The People react, apologize(in falsetto), and back down to something slightly less scummy with enough people being 'ok' with it.
    Either way, the company wins and the customer loses.


    Fewer folks taking interest in the PC or DIYPC space?
    Fewer folks buying top end gpus due to being priced out, compared to several years ago?
    Lower tech site traffic? Folks needing help troubleshooting their fancy new hardware, but not getting replies or waiting a day or more before getting any, due to dwindling interest/fewer people experienced with the same hardware available to provide assistance?
    I agree, a lot of this content has definitely moved to youtube, so less people are reading compared to in the past is a part of it. I mean Gamersnexus is basically all youtube at this point, they still maintain a site but it doesn't have anywhere near the print content it used to, and the stuff thats on there is basically the video script. Guru3d still maintains a site but Hilberts readership is also super down, I'm sure the statistics would definitely be interesting to look at over the past few years
    Reply
  • spentshells
    artk2219 said:
    I agree, a lot of this content has definitely moved to youtube, so less people are reading compared to in the past is a part of it. I mean Gamersnexus is basically all youtube at this point, they still maintain a site but it doesn't have anywhere near the print content it used to, and the stuff thats on their is basically the video script. Guru3d still maintains a site but Hilberts readership is also super down, I'm sure the statistics would definitely be interesting to look at over the past few years
    gaming jesus as they say..... most of these folks are too snarky and well opinionated. math doesnt run on opinion
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    spentshells said:
    I was going for brand loyalty.
    Some are gonna move to amd on the high end is what I was infering.
    Gotcha. Sucks that brand loyalty is still a thing.
    As for moving to AMD, yeah, some will do that, others are waiting in the hopes it gets them more affordable Geforce gpus - which is rather twisted; refuse to go anywhere near a Radeon, but relies on it for the chance to get lower prices on that TUF 4080(or whatever) they were eyeing...
    Reply
  • cknobman
    The only thing Nvidia is doing would be trying to figure out how to screw its customers as much as possible.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    hannibal said:
    Well.. As I expected 4070ti...
    But lets see, but it makes most sense. Faster than normal cut down 4070... And a price that actually is less than $1000. It will sell like hotcakes at $899 ;)
    O mores o tempora...


    ... Maybe triple the amount of AMD 7900XTX and 7900XT together? With 20% to 30% less speed! Marketing is wonderous thing!
    That price is far to much of a faction of of the 4090's price and the 4090 is priced far to high.
    It ad less than half the cores (16384/7680) with half the memory 24GB/12GB)with on half the memory bus (384/192).

    Quoting from https://www.tomshardware.com/news/4080-12GB-benchmarks-confirm-nvidias-cancellation
    But the 4080 12GB's performance in 3DMark says it all. According to the Chiphell post, the RTX 4080 12GB tested managed a GPU score of just 13,472 points in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and 10,794 points in TimeSpy Extreme.

    For comparison, these numbers translate into equal to slightly better performance than an RTX 3080 12GB in the exact same benchmarks, according to 3DMark's benchmark browser. It's worth noting that the 30 series GPUs in the browser's results were manually overclocked, but still, that means the RTX 4080 12GB sits right in between a stock RTX 3080 12GB and RTX 3080 Ti.
    The 4080 12GB was about half of the performance of a 4090 and the price should also be less than half of it too. About 40% of it may be about right considering the premium you pay at the top end.
    Reply
  • 10tacle
    When Nvidia formally announced its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB this September, it was a rather odd graphics card from the start. The board carried Nvidia's AD104 in its full configuration, featuring 7680 CUDA cores and a 192-bit memory interface.

    That's right. Nvidia's 3070 Ti and 1070 Ti both had a 256-bit memory bus (there was no 2070 Ti but the 2070 also was 256-bit). Going back in time, the GTX 970, 770, and 670 were also all 256-bit. And the 570 and 470 both were actually 320-bit. What the hell were they thinking at Nvidia?
    Reply