Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti could arrive soon – but Team Green needs a Christmas miracle

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti has been listed by an Italian retailer with a release date of January 5.

If true, this means that the third Lovelace graphics card is only a month away from hitting the shelves – but naturally, we should take any such leak with a great deal of skepticism.

That said, it does back up previous spinning from the rumor mill which put forward a January 5 on-sale date for the RTX 4070 Ti, so this isn’t the first time we’ve been treated to this prediction.

The retailer in question is Drako, as flagged up by French tech site Cowcotland (via Wccftech), with the listed card being an Asus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti TUF. However, in the last hour, the Italian retailer has taken down the listing, and the link provided no longer works.

Further speculation here from Cowcotland contends that the RTX 4070 Ti will be announced the day before it’s on-sale, so January 4. But that doesn’t fit with the fact that Nvidia has a GeForce event on January 3 at CES 2023, which surely must be where the new Lovelace GPU will be revealed (indeed, if it is unveiled).

Analysis: Growing likelihood that the RTX 4070 Ti is imminent

It’s worth noting that rather oddly, Drako stated ‘O12G, 16GB GDDR6X’ in the product listing title, but under the specs for the GPU, it clearly mentioned 12GB of VRAM. Of course, this is the 12GB that was to be found in the canceled lower-tier RTX 4080 that-never-was, which this RTX 4070 Ti is essentially a disguised version of, as we’ve discussed in the past. Presumably the mention of 16GB was a mistake in the product title (it also said ‘12G’ of course, which stands for 12 Gigabytes).

No other spec info was given by the now vanished product listing, and under the CUDA Cores amount, the retailer just stated ‘to be announced’, so we were still left  in the dark there. Well, not quite completely in the dark, because the rumor mill has floated the idea that the RTX 4070 Ti will run with 7,680 CUDA Cores and a 192-bit memory bus, along with a TDP of 285W.

Regarding January 5, this could be a case of the Italian retailer having guessed at a date, or in other words, it was a placeholder – maybe picking up on the aforementioned date from the rumor mill and using that. We simply don’t know, but one other piece of evidence that does suggest the RTX 4070 Ti isn’t far off is a filing of multiple Gigabyte models of the card which was recently unearthed.

Furthermore, with this being a sort of relaunch of that RTX 4080 lower-tier spin – or that’s certainly the prevailing theory, for obvious reasons – it’d be no surprise that everything was in place for a relatively swift release of the 4070 Ti. We shall see next month…

With no mention of the price tag being made, that’ll obviously be a key element. The hope is that we might see a $699 MSRP in the US (and prices in line with that elsewhere), but we don’t feel too optimistic that this will translate into reality. A more likely pitch for Nvidia is $749, maybe even $799, though clearly it should be less than the canceled RTX 4080 12GB which ran to $899 before the GPU was ‘unlaunched’ by Team Green (following a less than positive reception, shall we say).

The danger of overpricing is that Nvidia will leave the door open for AMD’s inbound RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX graphics cards, which come out December 13, but perhaps not in any great quantity until the end of the month if rumors on the Team Red side are right.

That being the case, these new RDNA 3 GPUs from AMD are going to be pretty much going up against the RTX 4070 Ti as well as the 4080, so Nvidia might want to take the opportunity to price a bit more competitively, and gain some seasonal goodwill back from gamers.

Goodwill that Team Green is still rapidly losing, between the extortionate pricing for third-party custom models of the RTX 4080, and with the RTX 4090, the whole cable melting controversy which really isn’t helping Nvidia’s cause either – certainly not now that reported cases are over 50.