Although this is more of a rumor, Nvidia is reportedly temporarily scaling back production and supply of its new RTX 4070 (opens in new tab) graphics cards.

Chinese sources, Board Channel/Bobantang forums (opens in new tab) (via Benchlife (opens in new tab)), suggest a consensus that Nvidia will limit RTX 4070 supply for about a month The report also mentions the rumored supply cutback, suggesting a consensus that Nvidia will limit RTX 4070 supply for about a month.

The implication is that the RTX 4070 is not selling as well as expected, certainly not in comparison to the production increase the green team has implemented for this launch, and retailers are flooded with unsold cards. As a result, Nvidia is reducing supply to drive up prices.

Indeed, the RTX 4070 has been widely available since its launch. In the past few days, several cards have appeared in retailers around the world at prices well below Nvidia's recommended retail price.

We spoke to a UK retailer who said that RTX 4070 sales were considerably lower than they had expected. Gamers are paying attention to the cards on these retail sites, and the traffic on their pages proves it, but the number of people actually buying the cards is low.

One UK retailer, Overclockers.co.uk (opens in new tab), currently has no less than three RTX 4070s well below MSRP. The cheapest, the Gainward GeForce RTX 4070 Ghost (opens in new tab), costs £549.95, which comes to $568 excluding the monstrous 20% UK sales tax. This is considerably cheaper than the RTX 4070's official MSRP of $599.

The question arises whether Nvidia's premium pricing strategy is beginning to succumb to pressure. As we have reported, most other PC hardware components have returned to what might be called pre-pandemic price levels (open in new tab), and some components, including storage and RAM, are at historic lows.

As a result, megabucks graphics cards are now very unusual. This is reflected in the fact that every time a new Nvidia RTX 40 GPU is released, pricing dominates the discussion.

At the very least, Nvidia's "de-launch" of the RTX 4080 12GB (open in new tab) and repositioning it in the lower price range under the brand name RTX 4070 Ti (open in new tab) was a direct response to the negative reaction to its premium pricing strategy.

With negative PR rising with each new release, the RTX 4070 may not sell well and Nvidia may be forced to limit supply as a result, so where the company prices future RTX 40 GPUs like the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 It will be interesting to see. We do not expect to like Nvidia's price, but it will still likely be lower than Nvidia originally intended or expected.