Rumors of Nvidia's next-generation graphics card are gaining steam, but somewhat oddly, it is not the RTX 4070. Instead, following the release of the RTX 4070 Ti (opens in new tab) in early January, one might have expected to see a lot of noise in the Twitterverse about the next card to be released on the same GPU.

But in fact, regular Twitter snooper @kopite7kimi (opens in new tab) has developed his own "leak" about the RTX 4060 Ti graphics card launch.

Some folks are talking about an announcement at Computex, which feels like a good framework to me, but in cold January it sure feels far away.

According to the first leaks in mid-December last year, the card was supposed to be based on an AD106 GPU with 4,352 cores, 8GB GDDR6 memory, 32MB L2 cache and 220W TGP, but they have revised these power requirements downward. The current rumored figure is 160W, which is about 80% of the total graphics power of the previous generation 200W RTX 3060 Ti (open in new tab) and RTX 3070 (open in new tab) cards.

We have previously discussed our concerns with the previous specs (open in new tab), primarily due to the fact that the GPU itself appears very weak in terms of raw shaders compared to the RTX 3060 Ti. However, Nvidia seems to have made a bone to pick with this GPU.

Still, the fact that it outperformed the RTX 3060 Ti at 160W TGP highlights the efficiency of the Ada architecture. Now @kopite7kimi claims that RTX 4060 Ti is comparable to the previous generation RTX 3070 in terms of performance.

This is definitely the minimum goal for a new GPU. Therefore, the RTX 4060 Ti, while hardly exciting, is minimally effective. What is scary, however, is how much Nvidia will price this mid-range card.

The RTX 3060 Ti is a $399 card at launch, and one would hope that the RTX 4060 Ti will match it. This is the logical way to look at it. But the pessimistic realist in me can't help but worry about the possibility of a $500 sticker price for a mainstream Ada card. [After all, the RTX 4070 Ti is $799, and I wouldn't be surprised if the RTX 4070 goes to $650. But it would be crazy indeed: the same price as the RTX 3070?

What will 2023 offer?