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The RTX 4070 is ridiculously high-priced at $749, according to recent developments reported by reliable leaker Moore's Law is Dead. The card will reportedly be costlier than the 80-class entry from the last-gen Ampere lineup, which was introduced at $699 in 2020.
It is worth noting that the RTX 3070 is much more affordable and costs gamers merely $499. Almost two and a half years after its existence, the card can be bought for around $420 on leading websites.
Thus, Nvidia's leaked pricing of the upcoming GPU has caused ripples in the gaming community, who have criticized Team Green for charging exorbitant rates for their mainstream gaming cards.
A $749 RTX 4070 might tank its sales numbers
It is worth noting that the high prices of the new graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia have already proven counter-productive as GPU sales have nosedived. While it was previously predicted that PC hardware demand would plummet, the increasingly low demand for the latest and greatest is quite concerning.
On the other hand, Team Green's latest cards, including the upcoming RTX 4070, promise solid performance gains over the last-gen. DLSS 3.0 and its frame generation is a bonus to the improved Ada Lovelace technology.
One also has to factor in the inflation aspect. The world is in a post-pandemic recession; inflation rates are higher than ever. Thus, $600 in 2020 is worth much more today.
Nvidia has chiefly included the above two factors in describing the high prices of the latest RTX 40 series cards. However, the recession has backfired on the company's sales numbers, as the 4080 and 4090 are among the last few cards in the Steam Hardware Survey. An abnormally priced 4070 would meet a similar fate.
The slight reported variation in performance between the RTX 4070 and 3080 graphics cards is concerning.
It has been previously rumored that the upcoming 4070 will be almost equivalent to the last-gen RTX 3080 GPU.
According to theoretical estimates, the 70-class offering from this generation will have a floating point performance of about 29.15 TFLOPs. In contrast, the 3080 packs an estimated floating point performance of 29.77 TFLOPs.
Although theoretical performance does not accurately represent how these cards will perform in video games, it gives an estimate of what to expect from these GPUs.
In conclusion, a $749 RTX 4070 will be a bad idea for gamers and Nvidia. The mid-range 70-class GPUs have generally been a $500 offering from the company. They have exhibited a solid balance between performance and pricing. This is evident from the overwhelmingly high number of gamers who opted for the Ampere-based variant.
Jeopardizing the affordability of this segment will, thus, not be a wise decision on Team Green's part.
