Nvidia Super rumors – RTX 4080, 4070, 4070 Ti variants

Although yet to be confirmed, the RTX 40-series Nvidia Super cards have been in the news of late, with rumors around the RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti Super, and 4070 Super. Quite why, Nvidia would feel it needs to bring these cards out we’ll come onto shortly, but below we cover the latest news and information on the potential arrivals.

Nvidia Super release date rumors

The latest news to hit regarding the potential release of new Super variants of Nvidia’s latest lineup is for the RTX 4080 Super. The suggestion is that the card, and other Supers, will appear in ‘early 2024’, and plug some of the gaps Nvidia feels there are in the current gen stack. At this point, it’s impossible to pin down a proper date or even window, as information is scarce and only available (so not necessarily reliable), from leakers. Leakers like Kopite7kimi, who seems to have noted the existence of ‘RTX 40-series Super’ cards.

Nvidia Super specs rumors

This seems to have been corroborated, as noted by Videocardz, when a new SKU was added to Techpowerup’s PCI ID repository. The repository is essentially a database of information maintained by a group that can add new data, based on third-party (non-public) information as well as leaks and information derived from driver and BIOS updates. The new SKU was added by one of this group, named T4CFantasy, who according to Videocardz “holds access to early GPU BIOS and GPU-Z validations”.

The ID added was ‘2703’, and the SKU reads “AD103 [GeForce RTX 4080 Super]”, with the ‘AD103’ of course relating to ‘Ada Lovelace’ chips. The AD103 part here is interesting because leaker Kopite7Kimi has stated that the 4080 Super part “can use AD102 or AD103”. In the same tweet, the leaker also suggests an RTX 4070 Super “can use AD103 or AD104”.

Obviously, this is all speculation at this point, but for clarity, RTX 4090 uses AD102, RTX 4080 uses AD103, and RTX 4070 uses AD104. So any ‘Supers’ would sit between those, regardless of “chip mixing”. In terms of detailed specs, again there’s no clear picture as there’s nothing official. But, based on the lineup and additional rumors, an RTX 4080 Super could feature 20GB of GDDR6X, a 4070 Ti Super 16GB of GDDR6X, and a 4070 Super 16GB. However, you’d think the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super variants would need to be substantially different elsewhere. Or is there more to this? (Spoiler, there may be – keep reading).

Here’s the current 40-series lineup with rumored parts included.

As we can see above, that’s a lot of cards and not particularly tidy. AMD has just five current-gen cards by the way. But things get more confusing when you get to consider pricing…and probably demand for cards like the RTX 4080 Super. So let’s get into that.

Nvidia Super rumors – pricing thoughts

We’re very much in guessing territory here, but the numbers being attached to potential RTX 40-series Supers are…let’s say interesting. It’s easy to think that Nvidia looked at available silicon, looked at its current pricing, and thought, “we can fill those gaps that are needed”. But are they needed? We’ve ignored the rumored prices in the table above because we just don’t know. But the gaps get harder to justify the lower down you go in the table.

Yes, there’s a $400 gap between 4080 and 4090, but the best RTX 4070 cards are the darling of the 40-series and can play 4K games without issue. And so can the 4070 Ti and 4080. An RTX 4080 Super priced at, let’s say a $1399 MSRP is already $400 more expensive than a 7900 XTX and feels unnecessary. In fact, we share the view of Sebastien Kozlowski on WePC – we don’t need an RTX 4080 Super.

And what about a 4070 Ti Super and a 4070 Super? Both potential cards could be seen as doubling down on the mid-stack. But it could also be seen as diluting it. After all, while slotting in a 4070 Ti Super at around $1000 could be done, and a 4070 Super at $650, won’t it just drive people to the original 4070? Let’s not forget AMD has good options in the sub-$1000 categories.

RTX 4080 and 4070 Ti retiring?

Nvidia’s plans here though seem to be shifting its own competitors to new Super cards into retirement. That’s according to a recent report from Videocardz, which suggests that the 4070 Ti and 4080 are no longer in mass production. The source for this potential move is cited as Board Channels, which reportedly aggregates news from AMD, Intel and Nvidia. If it was the case, it would declutter what looks to be an odd 11-card lineup including rumored Super parts.

Kevin’s thoughts

But I suppose we’ll see, and we’ll be tracking the rumors as they arrive. Still, sober component thinking here, let’s not forget the most popular graphics card in the latest Steam survey is the RTX 3060. with that in mind, you’d have to think that above that level GPU demand really does shrink pretty rapidly. Any new Nvidia Super cards may well find interest, particularly if two are shuffling into retirement. But it’s still hard to see the exact need right now.