Nvidia’s original 10GB RTX 4070 was a terrible idea

Nvidia had plans to create a 10GB RTX 4070, and thank God they didn’t

Today, thanks to @harukaze5719, we now know what Nvidia’s original plans were for their RTX 4070. Nvidia once planned to release a 10GB RTX 4070, a graphics card with 20% less memory than what Nvidia eventually released.

My first thoughts on this set of RTX 4070 specifications is “yuck”. 10GB is not enough VRAM for a graphics card of this class. A lot of games can run into memory capacity related issues on Nvidia’s 10GB RTX 3080, and the same would be true for the RTX 4070 10GB. Simply put, modern GPUs benefit from having a lot of VRAM. That said, this once considered GPU has some other interesting specifications.

In one key way, Nvidia’s planned RTX 4070 is more powerful than what was eventually released. Nvidia’s retail RTX 4070 GPU has only 5888 CUDA cores. This leaked 10GB prototype has 7268 CUDA cores. That’s the same CUDA core count as Nvidia’s RTX 4070 SUPER. It also sports a higher base clock of 2355 MHz. In terms of compute performance, this early RTX 4070 prototype is better than what we eventually got at retail.

https://t.co/suhvR7WiPr pic.twitter.com/ikcw1x3bez

— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) July 15, 2024

I think Nvidia made the right decision to release their RTX 4070 GPU with 12GB of VRAM. One of the primary reasons that we do not like Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti is because we think that 8GB of VRAM is not enough for modern games. The same is true for 10GB GPUs, albeit to a lesser extent.

Moving forward, I hope that Nvidia will add more VRAM to their lower-end graphics cards. They avoided a big mistake by not releasing a 10GB RTX 4070, and I hope that this lesson carries forward into the future.

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s original 10GB RTX 4070 GPU on the OC3D Forums.