Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4070 graphics card, once rumored to be available for $749 (open in new tab), is now priced at $599 (open in new tab) according to the latest information.

The pricing is relative considering that the RTX 4070 Ti (open in new tab) costs $799, the RTX 4080 (open in new tab) costs $1299, and the RTX 4090 (open in new tab) costs $1599. The RTX 3070's launch price in 2021 was $499 ( open in new tab) was $100 more than the RTX 3070, but the RTX 3070 sold for little at that price as the GPU boom continued.

Anyway, there is nothing official on "what the rumored $599 will get you," but there are rumors about specs, and the card is expected to arrive next month, so the odds are pretty good that they are accurate.

So here goes: the RTX 4070 will have exactly the same number of CUDA cores as the old RTX 3070, 5,888, but the memory bus is said to be 192 bits, smaller than the RTX 3070's 256-bit bus, given that the RTX 4070 Ti has a 192-bit bus, 192-bit bus is almost a certainty; there is zero chance that the 4070 will stick with a 256-bit bus.

All of this may sound worrisome, but the RTX 4070 will have higher memory and core clocks. It will also have significantly more cache memory at the final level, if we follow the standard RTX 40 series trend. Rumors suggest a core clock of just under 2.5 GHz, which, if true, would be significantly higher than the 1.725 GHz of the 3070. As a result, it will be capable of 29TFLOPS of computation, compared to the RTX 3070's 20TFLOPS. [Similarly, the faster GDDR6X memory means that the rumored RTX 4070 bandwidth is 504GB/s, slightly higher than the 448GB/s of the 3070. In addition, the 192-bit bus means 12GB of graphics memory, a worthy step over the 3070's 8GB.

This raw computing performance is also well above the older RTX 3070 Ti, which recorded 22 TFLOPS, almost matching the performance of the venerable RTX 3080. On the other hand, it falls far short of the RTX 4070 Ti's official performance of 40TFLOPS.

Calculations show the 4070 Ti at just under $20 per TFLOPS and the 4070 at just over $20 per TFLOPS. Incidentally, the RTX 4090 is also about $20 per TFLOP. And that sums up our problem with this latest RTX 40 series of Nvidia GPUs.

Since when do top-end GPUs compete with 4th tier graphics cards on pure value? This is new. And not very interesting.

Still, this latest rumor is within a reasonable range of what we can expect from Nvidia; it's hard to imagine Nvidia pricing the RTX 4070 below $599, at least at launch.

Yes, this is the world we live in: a 165Hz 1440p monitor can be had for $240 (open in new tab), but $599 for a rumored Nvidia '70-class GPU somehow seems like a relatively good prospect. Oh well.