Final Thoughts
NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 already seems to be a much more popular launch than other recent GeForce offerings, and it’s hard to argue against a xx70 card that matches the performance of the previous xx80 card, for less money. And please, try to keep pricing of these things in their proper context. I’ll expound on this thought in the next two paragraphs.
Consider that the GTX 1080 launched at $599 in May of 2016 (that was SEVEN years ago), and the Founders Edition was originally $699 (a $100 premium!). Now, it didn’t take all that long for NVIDIA to drop the price of the GTX 1080 to $499, and by the time the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition launched we were looking at a $699 flagship. By the time the RTX 2080 launched, pricing had jumped to $799, and many of us lamented the “RTX tax”. Somehow the RTX 3080 launching at the original $699 price of the GTX 1080 FE was considered a slap in the face, but it wasn’t ever widely available for $699 (thanks to the obsession with “mining” make-believe digital money).
Here we are, well into our third year since the RTX 3080 launch, and mining isn’t profitable anymore, so cards are starting to become readily available at MSRP again. And that is significant as the $599 MSRP of the RTX 4070 is legitimate, and you will be able to buy one at that price. Even a big, overbuilt, factory-overclocked variant like this MSI GAMING X TRIO is only $50 more, and can be found right now for $649.99 (Newegg link), in stock and shipping as I write this.
Pricing rant over. You, dear reader, will have to decide if RTX 3080-level performance – with access to the latest DLSS technology, overall improvements to real-time ray tracing performance, and AV1 encoding – has been fairly priced this generation. I think it has, and that the RTX 4070 will be the most popular NVIDIA card this generation – until the RTX 4060 Ti launches, that is. But who knows when that will be.
