NVIDIA RTX 4070 leak shows cards with different VRAM loadouts - what's going on?

NVIDIA's inbound RTX 4070 graphics card has been spotted with different amounts of video RAM in GIGABYTE listings for various models of the card.

2

Product listings as unearthed on the GIGABYTE website (Image Credit: VideoCardz)

As you might imagine, this has caused some confusion, as there are GIGABYTE RTX 4070 products (unearthed by VideoCardz, a regular source of GPU leaks) that have 10GB of VRAM, as well as 12GB, and also 16GB (including AORUS Master, Eagle and Gaming OC cards).

This may lead some to believe that NVIDIA might be planning to push out multiple versions of the RTX 4070 with different memory loadouts, but that's very unlikely to be the case.

What's most likely happened here is that NVIDIA has been experimenting with cards that offer 10GB, 12GB, or perhaps even 16GB of RAM, as development has progressed with the RTX 4070. So what we see here is GIGABYTE's placeholder entries for these potential models.

Or indeed this could be a mistake on GIGABYTE's part, at least with some of these entries that have been leaked here. That would make sense with the apparent 16GB model, as this configuration doesn't match up with the other specs that have been spilled for the RTX 4070, and of course the 4070 Ti only has 12GB of VRAM. Meaning that it seems unlikely the vanilla version of this GPU would have more.

Previous rumors have pointed to the RTX 4070 running with 12GB of memory just like the Ti version, and this seems by far the most likely bet.

The graphics card is also expected to offer 5,888 CUDA Cores, a considerable drop from the 4070 Ti which sports 7,680. The plain 4070 is rumored also to drop clock speeds somewhat, as you might expect, but on the upside, its power usage will be proportionately decreased (to a 200W TGP in theory). So, that's a brighter point for those worried about their power bills in the current cost of living crisis that's hitting many wallets hard.

If the rumor mill is correct, the RTX 4070 is set to be released by NVIDIA in April, so it might not be far away now. The GPU many folks are waiting for on the desktop, mind you, is the RTX 4060 that'll considerably drop the price tag of the Lovelace family to a more affordable level (relatively speaking). Or at least we hope that'll be the case, but with NVIDIA's current pricing strategy, we don't hold out much hope for anything that might resemble a bargain.

The other downside with the RTX 4060 is that we could be waiting quite a while to see it arrive - perhaps not until mid-year, going by previous word on the grapevine. We may see the RTX 4060 Ti debut sooner than that, though, but ultimately this is all educated guesswork. The RTX 4070 is certainly thought to be the next Lovelace GPU on the horizon.