Nvidia "unlaunched" its 12GB RTX 4080 Ti late last year, amidst backlash over its fundamentally different specs than the full-fat RTX 4080, and its $899 price. But after rebadging and repackaging, that card is returning to store shelves on January 5th as the RTX 4070 Ti, with a $799 starting price that's at least slightly easier to stomach.
Announced earlier today at Nvidia's CES keynote kickoff, the full specs of the RTX 4070 Ti have yet to be officially revealed. But just days ago, Nvidia accidentally listed the card on its own site, before pulling it. So we know the card will sport 7,680 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6X memory and a boost clock of 2.61 GHz — just like the graphics card formerly known as the 4080 12GB.
For its part, Nvidia has now re-launched a product page for the RTX 4070 Ti, where it emphasizes its better-than RTX 3090 Ti performance at not much more than half the power consumption. Sorry to any of the poor souls who bought an RTX 3090 Ti when it was selling for $2,000 or more just 10 months ago! The company says the RTX 4070 Ti idles at 12W, and pulls an average of 226W while gaming, compared to 398W on the RTX 2090 Ti.
Of course, DLSS 3 support also comes along for the ride, which will become much more important as more games launch that support it. According to Nvidia's latest count, DLSS 3 support for existing and upcoming games sits at 50. Nvidia also says the 4070 Ti should deliver up to a 70% performance boost over the RTX 3070 Ti in apps like Blender, Unity, and Unreal Engine.
Nvidia has lined up its partners to carry this card's launch, and links to RTX 4070 Ti cards from Asus, Colorful, Galax, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, Zotac and others. We'll need to test the card to see if it has what it takes to make our Best Graphics Cards page. But even if it performs well at $799, the real question is going to be how many cards will be available at that price, or if the vast majority of models will sell at or above the original $899 asking price of the now re-branded RTX 4080 12GB.
There's also still the question of how the RTX 4070 Ti performs without DLSS 3, which is a big part of the "faster than 3090 Ti" story so far. While 50 released and upcoming games might feature support for the new frame doubling technology, it's not without critics and at times creates artifacts. We also tested Portal RTX and found that, as expected, you need a base performance well above 30 fps before Frame Generation kicks in if you don't want a game to feel sluggish.
$799 might be more palatable than the $899 price originally announced for the RTX 4080 12GB, but it's also $200 more than the starting price for the outgoing RTX 3070 Ti. The Ada Lovelace architecture has plenty of new features, and we should see a big jump in performance relative to the old 3070 Ti — and 50% more memory will be beneficial as well, even if it sits on a 192-bit interface, as the larger L2 cache size comes into play. Still, it's sad to see such a massive increase in generational pricing.
