The Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti (RTX 4080 12GB) was officially unveiled at Nvidia's CES Special Presentation (opens in new tab); a $799 launch price and January 5 release date (opens in new tab) had already been announced.

But now Nvidia has shown off a few more of its own performance metrics, and this third Ada GPU will "maximize your 1440p gaming monitor," says Nvidia's Jeff Fisher. Nvidia's numbers show that this card will outperform the RTX 3090 Ti It is worth noting that these numbers were generated under a best-case scenario with the addition of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation.

We recommend waiting for independent numbers before jumping to performance conclusions. I don't think we need to wait too long. ...... [especially considering that Nvidia announced it as the RTX 4080 12GB at the end of 2022 and then didn't announce it afterwards (open in new tab) given the embarrassment of having two different GPUs with the exact same name.

The RTX 4070 Ti has the same specs and uses the same AD104 GPU, but is priced $100 lower. So both the $1200+ RTX 4080 16GB (open in new tab) and the $899 RX 7900 XT (open in new tab) are likely to be even more crummy than they are now.

The RTX 4070 Ti will have fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 3080 10GB, a memory system similar to the RTX 3060, and a GPU only slightly larger than the RTX 3050.

If this is anything like the existing RTX 40 series cards, they will rely on a combination of high clock speeds and plentiful L2 cache to outpace higher-spec previous generation GPUs.

One sad thing is that Nvidia has yet to offer mainstream gamers any hope in terms of a more sensible budget-friendly GPU release. Sure, the $799 price tag is cheaper than the original price displayed on AMD's new card and the old RTX 4080 12GB badge, but it is still a huge sum for a single component.

In this regard, Fisher explains that "the RTX 30 series continues to be the best GPU for mainstream gamers," but does not even hint at the sadness with which this phrase is received.