The Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, née RTX 4080 12GB, has now been officially announced at Nvidia’s CES Special Address in news that will come as a shock to no-one. Such is the leaky GPU industry that we’d already had both the $799 launch price and the January 5 release date unveiled.

But now Nvidia has shown off a few more of its own performance metrics, promising this third-tier Ada GPU will “max out your 1440p gaming monitor,” so sayeth Nvidia’s Jeff Fisher. Nvidia’s numbers show the card outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti by quite some way, but it’s probably worth noting the numbers are likely to be taken under the best case scenarios with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation thrown in for good measure.

I’d suggest waiting for some independent numbers before jumping to any performance conclusions. I have a feeling you won’t have to wait too long…

We already know a fair amount about the RTX 4070 Ti, especially given that Nvidia had previously announced it as the RTX 4080 12GB at the tail end of 2022 before subsequently unlaunching it given the consternation about having two disparate GPUs under the exact same name.

The RTX 4070 Ti then has the same spec, uses the same AD104 GPU, but now comes with a $100 lower price tag. That’s likely only going to make both the RTX 4080 16GB at $1,200+ and the RX 7900 XT at $899 even more unpalatable than they already are.

With this expected identical spec that means the RTX 4070 Ti is going to come with fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 3080 10GB, a memory system more akin to the RTX 3060, and a GPU that’s only a little bigger than the one inside an RTX 3050. 

If it’s anything like the existing RTX 40-series cards then it will be relying on a combination of high clock speeds and a surfeit of L2 cache to push it ahead of the higher spec previous gen GPUs.

One sad thing to note is that Nvidia is still not offering any hope to mainstream gamers in terms of any GPU releases more tailored towards a sensible budget. Sure, the $799 price tag is lower than AMD’s new cards, and the original price it was listed at under the old RTX 4080 12GB badge, but it’s still a huge amount of money for a single component.

On that front Fisher explains that “the RTX 30-series continues to be the best GPU for mainstream gamers,” without even a hint of the sadness to which that phrasing will be received.