I just made my move and got a 3070 at $300. Used of course, but with warranty seals intact and 6 more months of warranty coverage. So I lost 20% performance at 50% price.
Sure, but you're still stuck with 8GB of VRAM. That's going to cripple the hell out of that card.
Nice. Mine was roughly 420 but at the end of 2022. Good card in these crazy times of inflated prices.
But not a good card in these crazy times of inflated VRAM requirements.
Every new launch makes me appreciate my 6950 XT more.
I feel the same way about my RX 6800 XT.
And since I got the Asus TUF OC edition that comes with 2x8 pin PCIE power, no need to change PSU or get funky adapters.
Well at least you got that.
TBH, I don't like however some AMD cards having good value, it all boils down to how Nvidia has DLSS and AMD doesn't and we need to pretend that FSR doesn't exist or its sooo inferior that it is not even worth mentioning?
I agree but it really doesn't matter because it'll be years before this card needs to use DLSS. With my RX 6800 XT, I didn't buy it for FSR because I know that by the time I might need FSR, it's going to be incredible. It's why I always say "Buy hardware for the HARDWARE because the software can always be created, improved or modified after the fact but the hardware cannot. A card dies with the same amount of VRAM that it's born with but FSR can go through several iterations.
Thank you for the review Steve. Great work, useful advices too. And indeed, 4070 is the best affordable price/performance new 4xxx gen Nvidia offers nowadays, including what we've seen from AMD, I mean they still not released any new mid-range videocard.
I know, eh? I was saying the same thing.
I made a similar move too.
I was prepared to wait for AMD and Nvidia new gen videocard to settle down.
2 days ago I found a great offer from one of my supplier, a new ASUS TUF RX 7900XTX OC for "only" 840 Euro, so I took it instantly
Good call! I wish I had your supplier!
You guys are funny... it is a 3080 with 12GB of VRAM, 2 years later, at 600$ MSRP...
This is not a 90/100 GPU, it is a joke. So much for saying that less than 16GB of VRAM is now an issue, just to give this card 90/100.
The fact that you can buy a 6950XT for about the same price, is making this GPU DOA.
Didn't you know? They're generally not allowed to give GeForce cards scores less than 80. If you look over the past two generations, this has been true (with ONE exception, the RTX 3060 8GB).
You have a valid point, just that for nowdays videocard market, 4070 is perhaps one of the best offers we can buy. In some markets, it is already hard to find 6950XT and the top new gen videocards, both from Nvidia and AMD are still overpriced in my opinion.
Though the Techspot score is quite overhyped, but this is my personal opinion.
BTW chat, If is OK for Techspot staff, I am thinking to propose to everybody, if they are willing too, to give their personal score point for the card, to see, like a poll, what chat forum users average score will be. And without any drama, let's keep it civilized.
I can give 85 points to 4070 videocard.
Let's the forum poll begin.
For less than 16GB of VRAM at $600USD, no more than 70. This card is already outclassed by the RX 6950 XT and has 25% less VRAM than the RX 6800. It's not impressive at all.
Are you kidding me? Beside the 4090, this whole lineup by Nvidia has been unimpressive.
If you put in perspective the MSRPs of the 4000 series, than it is rather an abysmal showing from Nvidia.
Just add the whole not enough VRAM problems on most of Nvidia SKUs and you have all the ingredients to skip any SKUs beside the 4090. The 4080 would be interesting, but it is 300-400$ overpriced.
I'm thinking that there must be some kind of short-circuit in Markham because there haven't even been any leaks about the upcoming Radeons, let alone any announcements. It doesn't matter though because there are enough people out there who will buy nVidia no matter what. Remember that people who buy nVidia don't care about value, no matter how much they whine about it, because they keep doing the same thing over and over.
Man, I remember when that $600 price range used to land you a top-end tier card. Now it's only able to land you a mid-ranged card.....$650 8 years ago (cost for a 980Ti) is now the same as $822 today.
Maybe I'm really starting to realize that this might not be a hobby I continue in if pricing continues to climb and climb like it has been.
Well, in the last-gen, $650 DID get you a top-end tier card, the RX 6800 XT. Radeons make this hobby A LOT easier to continue because they make you immune to nVidia's pricing.
The only thing this card really has going for it is the power consumption. Everything else for the price of it is just pure sh*t. It's not faster than the 3080 and it even loses to it at 4K (in before the folks that scream, "but it's not meant for 4k!").
I'll just do what I can do and vote with my wallet - this generation of GPUs (from Nvidia and AMD) are not impressive enough to warrant me spending my money on their crap. Maybe next gen will be a proper improvement.
I honestly don't care what next-gen is like. I intend to keep my RX 6800 XT for several generations.
It's a bit of a shame that Nvidia didn't stick with the die usage scheme it followed with Ampere, namely using the top-tier chip for the 4090 and 4080.
It's not a shame, it's how nVidia works.
"In an ideal world, the GeForce RTX 4070 would be a $500 product"
In an ideal world, it would be free, wouldn't it?
Are we considering inflation here? I used an inflation calculator to compare the prices of the last five generations of xx70 cards, anchoring off the $329 970 from 2014:
970 $329
1070 $373
2070 $470
3070 $456
4070 $470
Since the 2070 five years ago, MSRPs for this series have been rather stable after accounting for inflation.
Oh jeez, not THIS crap again! If "inflation" had ANYTHING to do with it, we'd see CPU prices skyrocketing as well because they're both made of silicon. Except, oh yeah, that hasn't happened.
An examination of AMD's Ryzen pricing from 2017-2022 shows that there's really no excuse:
2017:
Ryzen 5 1600X - $249
Ryzen 7 1700X - $399
Ryzen 7 1800X - $499
2018:
Ryzen 5 2600X - $229
Ryzen 7 2700X - $329
2019:
Ryzen 5 3600X - $249
Ryzen 7 3700X - $329
Ryzen 7 3800X - $399
2020:
Ryzen 6 5600X - $299
Ryzen 7 5800X - $449
2022:
Ryzen 7 7600X - $299
Ryzen 7 5700X - $299
Ryzen 7 7700X - $399
So, between 2017 and 2022, with some slight ups and downs, the Ryzen 6 has increased by $50 and the Ryzen 7 x7xx has remained exactly the same. Meanwhile, between 2017 and 2020, the price of the Ryzen 7 x8xx has decreased by $50.
Inflation my posterior! It's just greed. Anyone who thinks otherwise is incredibly naive.
Anyways, it is what it is and we are at their mercy.
Your post is perfectly sound and I agree with all but this part of it. Only people who buy GeForce cards are at nVidia's mercy. I chose my path long ago and couldn't be happier about it because I'm NOT at their mercy. No amount of gimmickry will ever get me to buy a GeForce card. It's the only way to really be happy because it's the only way to really not care.
Thanks for the review! I think I'll just get a used 3080 10GB for $400ish and save myself $200ish.
Good luck with that 10GB of VRAM. Have you still not learned that buying a card with less than 12GB is just begging for trouble? Save yourself even more and get an RX 6800 XT. At least that card will last a good long time because of its 16GB. There's a reason that reviewers everywhere are saying to get something with at least 12GB if not 16. It's the same reason that I said the RTX 3080 was a terrible buy from day one.
I've tried RT in one game, Metro Exodus - I really couldn't care less about it. I had to enable DLSS to give decent frame rates and when looking around at some of the spots you could see things were blurred/smeared. I didn't care for the added ambience to give a performance hit like it did and the down scale/up scale of DLSS didn't help my opinion of things. That was the one and only time I tried RT and DLSS. Yeah, no thank you.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
I don't know who I feel worse for; AMD for being so far behind Nvidia in terms of RT performance or for Nvidia for having dedicated cores for RT and they still suck at it.
I don't feel bad for AMD because RT sucks no matter which card you use.
RT is still in the gimmicky stage and if none of the three dGPU manufacturers can improve upon it, it's just going to continue to be the bastardized red-headed step-child in the room - sure he's there, but most people are going to ignore him or verbally abuse him every chance they get and right now that is exactly what RT is.
I think that RT will never be anything more than a gimmick because we're already seeing its successor, path-tracing being showcased. RT will just be another footnote that nVidia used to soak people. I never needed it before and I sure as hell don't need it now.
The 4070 and 4070 Ti will age as bad as the 3080 10 GB. In a matter of 2 years at the latest we will see that they will starve for VRAM. Especially if you enable raytracing and Framegeneration.
Yeah, but people don't buy GeForce cards because they care about value. To them, it's like owning a BMW. It's overpriced as hell but it makes them feel oh so special!
On the one hand this card sounds like a similar price and performance to the 3080 and 6800 from last generation.
That's actually a huge problem because the value is supposed to increase exponentially from generation to generation, not stay the same.
On the other, it's place within overall industry context feels very different to me. The prior gen cards were premium cards, offering near the top of available performance for their time, and aligned with the start of a new console generation. (Even as a PC gamer I care about console lifecycles because I believe a lot of game development is strongly influenced by console capabilities, even games that ship on PC.) If you wanted a premium card nearly three years ago, those cards seemed like they fit the bill at an appropriate price.
I agree with you and they were. Then the Ethereum hit the fan and nVidia realised the truth, that there are a crap-tonne of people who will pay ANYTHING for a video card in a green box and that's why we're where we are.
The 4070 does not fit in the same place today. You are still paying premium class dollars, but you are getting nowhere near the top available performance, and you are buying in at what may be closer to the mid-point of this console generation.
It's because nVidia is trying to enact a paradigm shift to higher prices for their benefit, not ours. AMD isn't helping but AMD got shafted by consumers for so long that I really can't blame them.
Some people will need a card today and if they need this level of performance, that's where they are. For people who have more choice this feels like a pass and wait for future offers situation.
Make no mistake Brucey, nobody NEEDS this level of performance. Most games that I've seen look glorious and play amazingly well at 1080p. We're just a bunch of spoiled brats with our 1440p and 2160p gaming dreams. That's why I decided to use my RX 6800 XT until I literally couldn't anymore before buying anything new. Either the GPU will be too weak, the VRAM will be insufficient or the card will die before I buy a new one (and I have an RX 5700 XT as a backup card).