Nvidia launches RTX 4070 — South African pricing and specs

3 years ago 2

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Graphics card giant Nvidia has unveiled its latest product aimed at gamers — the GeForce RTX 4070 — and at least one South African online store has local pricing available.

The RTX 4070 is the fourth and most affordable entry in Nvidia’s latest generation of desktop graphics cards, joining the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090.

The company has punted the card as an ideal option for playing games at maxed-out settings in 1440p resolution, with up to 1.7 times the performance of the RTX 3070 Ti.

That is despite having a much lower power draw — 200W compared to 290W — meaning it is much more energy efficient.

Another powerful part of its specifications is the 12GB of GDDR6X video memory instead of the 8GB of GDDR6 (no “X”) on its predecessor — the RTX 3070 (the 3070 Ti has GDDR6X RAM, but also only 8GB).

With the help of its DLSS AI upscaling tech, Nvidia claims the RTX 4070 can achieve over 100 frames per second with maximum settings and ray-tracing turned on in many popular and demanding games.

“A Plague Tale: Requiem, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and other demanding games run at over 100 frames per second thanks to DLSS 3,” Nvidia said.

“So do popular DLSS 2 games, such as Battlefield 2042, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Nvidia said the RTX 4070 was also around 2.6 times faster than RTX 2070 Super and 1.4 times faster than the RTX 3080 with DLSS 3 turned on.

The graph below compares the performance of the RTX 4070 with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 2070 Super.

Some might be sceptical about why Nvidia did not include performance comparisons for native resolution rendering.

The cards the company is comparing to the RTX 4070 only support older versions of DLSS, so the AI upscaling tech might be playing a bigger role in the performance increases than raw power differences.

Nevertheless, DLSS 3 has received high praise for delivering vastly superior upscaling than its predecessors.

Regarding games without support for ray tracing or DLSS, Nvidia said the RTX 4070 offered performance on par with the RTX 3080 while running at nearly half the power.

Aside from its benefits for gaming, the RTX 4070 also supports hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding, which will help deliver superior quality live video streaming at lower bitrates than H.264.

Pricing and availability

Nvidia said the RTX 4070 would be available from 13 April 2023 with a manufacturer-suggested retail price (MSRP) starting at $599 in the US.

That is $100 more than its predecessor but the same price as the RTX 3070 Ti, which it easily beats in terms of performance.

At the time of publication, South African online PC retailer Evetech had two MSI models listed on its website.

The two-fan MSI Ventus 2X was available for R18,999, while the three-fan Gaming X Trio cost R19,999.

Wootware had RTX 4070 models listed from Asus, Gigabyte, Palit, and Zotac, but these did not yet have pricing.

It should be noted that card manufacturers have previously complained that the MSRPs Nvidia announces are much lower than they could realistically achieve.

The table below compares the specifications of the RTX 4070 with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070.