GPU silly season continues with a new round of claims from serial 'leak' outlet Moore's Law is Dead. This time it's the pricing and full specs for Nvidia's rumoured RTX 40 Super GPUs.
Namely, we're talking RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Super, and the word salad that is RTX 4070 Ti Super. All of what follows is merely a claimed leak, however the proposed line up does make sense. It also presents a good framework for considering the impact these Super GPUs will have on existing RTX 40 cards. And with that, here we go.
Up top, we have the RTX 4080 Super. As per another 'leak', it sticks with the existing AD103 die rather than receiving an upgrade to the AD102 monster used for the RTX 4090. Thus it tops out at 10,240 cores, runs a 256-bit bus, and packs 16GB of GDDR6X memory, whereas the regular RTX 4080 has 9,728 cores. And it's yours for $999, fully $200 less than the RTX 4080's launch price.
Next is the slightly silly sounding RTX 4070 Ti Super. That steps up from the AD104 chip used by the existing RTX 4070 Ti to the AD103 chip. With that comes not only 8,448 cores instead of the non-Super's 7,680 but also an upgrade from a 192-bit bus and 12GB to 256-bit and 16GB.
It's arguably more of a cut-down RTX 4080 as it is a Super 4070 Ti, but either way, the price is said to be $799, with a possible range of up to $849.
Finally, there's the RTX 4070 Super. That sticks with AD104, 192-bit and 12GB, but ups the core count to 7,168 from the non-Super's 5,888 cores.
As for performance boosts, the 4080 Super is predicted to offer a measly you'll-never-feel-it 6-9% boost. But then it's also predicted to be a lot cheaper than the 4080 was at launch. The 4070 Ti Super is predicted to bring up to 22% more performance for about the same price as the 4070 Ti was at launch.
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Meanwhile, the 4070 Super is expected to be nearly as fast as a 4070 Ti for a fair chunk less money. Overall, we suspect these figures are all pretty on the money or very close to what Nvidia will roll out next year, most likely at its CES keynote presentation. And it's all, well, OK. It's better than nothing without being the stellar improvement in performance-per-dollar we'd like to see from Nvidia.
That said, the shelves are still full of non-Super variants of these cards and likely still will be early next year. So, the big question is what happens to the pricing of cards like the regular RTX 4070 after these new Super GPUs land.
Already, you can grab an RTX 4070 for just $550. That's only likely to fall lower if an RTX 4070 Super lands at $599. So, the best thing about these new GPUs is the impact they almost certainly will have on the pricing of existing RTX 40 cards.
