Last week, rumors began surfacing that the AD103 and AD104 chips in Nvidia's RTX 40 series GPUs, the RTX 4080 and upcoming RTX 4070, respectively, could be cheaper to manufacture. Several GPU manufacturers have now confirmed this rumor, and while it will certainly help reduce manufacturing costs, whether it will lead to cheaper graphics cards is another matter entirely.

Nvidia's AIB partner Gainward was the first to confirm news of a new Step GPU, according to Igor's Lab (opens in new tab), followed by MSI, Galax and Colorful (via El Chapuzas (opens in new tab)) Each has given the go-ahead as to when the new versions of GPUs will be available.

These are by no means scaled-down versions with fewer cores. However, by shuffling the PCB design, Nvidia and its partners can eliminate some unnecessary components, such as comparator circuitry to help regulate voltage, and thus reduce manufacturing costs somewhat. To be clear, these new stepped GPUs are not an uncommon way for companies to refine and simplify manufacturing and reduce costs.

It is possible that Nvidia started this work to gain more loyalty from its AIB partners; after EVGA's exit from the GPU game (open in new tab), Nvidia's staff, unable to profit from their previously expensive graphics cards, no doubt had something weighing on their minds.

In any case, it looks like the day will come when we will see the RTX 4070's AD104-250 chip replaced by the AD104-251 version and the RTX 4080's AD103-300 replaced by the AD103-301. [Whether these will replace the RTX 4080's current chips is unknown, but Igor's Lab is confident that the -251 variant of the RTX 4070 will go into production within a few weeks of the standard version.