Nvidia announced the $599 RTX 4070, which will be available on April 13th

Nvidia is making its own new RTX 4070 graphics card official today After weeks of leaks. The RTX 4070 will be available on April 13th, starting at $599 for Nvidia’s Founders Edition. Nvidia renders the RTX 4070 for 1440p gaming at over 100fps with ray tracing and the company’s latest upscaling technology DLSS 3 enabled.

The RTX 4070 is Nvidia’s first 40-series Founders Edition card that’s reasonably sized, so it can fit in most cases — even those with small form factors. The RTX 4070 is actually shorter than the RTX 3080 and is designed to match its performance at 1440p at least. Built on Nvidia’s latest Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 4070 includes 12GB of GDDR6X instead of the 8GB found in both the previous RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti models.

That bump to 12GB of VRAM is welcome, but Nvidia could have gone further here — especially since the latest 1080p and 1440p games are now starting to eat away at 8GB or more. In a timely blog post, AMD explained why “memory matters” on GPUs earlier this week before Nvidia’s announcement. AMD was quick to point out how it shipped an RX 6800 with 16GB of VRAM over two years ago alongside the RX 6800 XT and RX 6950 XT, both with 16GB. AMD’s latest RX 7900 XTX comes with 24GB of memory, and the RX 7900 XT comes with 20GB.

Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 also includes support for the AV1 codec, which will be especially useful for streaming creators soon, as YouTube is gearing up to soon publish AV1 livestreams for improved bitrates and image quality. The RTX 4070 also supports DLSS 3, which promises to increase frame rates in games like Cyberpunk 2077 movieAnd Forza Horizon 5and the upcoming Bethesda Redfall.

DLSS 3 is exclusive to RTX 40 series cards and uses the same AI from DLSS 2 along with new AI frame generation technology to generate two frames using existing rendering technologies; Then a third frame is inserted between them. The result is significant frame rate boosts, which are essential for ray tracing and even improvements like track tracking in Cyberpunk 2077 movie.

Interestingly, Nvidia says that 83 percent of RTX 40-series owners enable ray tracing in RTX-enabled games, and 79 percent have DLSS enabled as well. RTX 30 series owners enable DLSS 71 percent of the time in RTX games, while 68 percent of RTX 20 series owners enable DLSS in these titles.

However, the large amount of ray tracing usage among RTX 40 series owners drops dramatically for the older cards. Only 56 percent of RTX 30-series owners enable ray tracing in RTX-enabled games, and 43 percent enable ray tracing on RTX 20-series cards. This high percentage is likely to drop for RTX 40-series cards as the lineup moves increasingly towards the mid-range. , where performance is often preferred over ray-traced visuals.