Nvidia is kickstarting 2023 with a surprise graphics card upgrade right out the gate. Mere days before its January 17 launch, the tech giant quietly boosted the specs on its incoming GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER GPU.
Originally announced at CES 2023, the RTX 4070 SUPER will headline Nvidia’s new RTX 40 SUPER series – more powerful versions of existing RTX 40 cards. It will sell for $599 alongside the non-SUPER RTX 4070 models, which see a simultaneous price drop to $549.
On paper, the two GPUs looked nearly identical, with 12GB GDDR6X memory and a 192-bit bus. But Nvidia has now clarified the SUPER version will include 48MB of L2 cache – 12MB more than the standard RTX 4070’s 36MB.
This pool of onboard memory may seem insignificant next to the overall 12GB VRAM. But even a little extra cache can provide a healthy performance lift when gaming. And early leaks suggest the bonus memory, plus a higher core count, will push the 4070 SUPER around 15-20% faster than its non-SUPER sibling.
For just $50 more, that’s tremendous added value – potentially making the 4070 SUPER a hot seller. It still trails the outgoing 4070 Ti slightly, but closes the gap significantly for those seeking strong 1440p gameplay.
Of course specs never tell the whole story – real-world testing will prove if a dozen megabytes makes a dramatic difference. But on paper, Nvidia may have another homerun on its hands that brings flagship-class power to a mainstream price point.
And AMD is surely taking notice mere weeks after debuting its own Radeon RX 7700 XT to compete in the same space. The new year is already shaping up to kick the ongoing GPU war into overdrive. Gamers can look forward to reaping the benefits through faster hardware and falling prices across the board.
So don’t sleep on those extra megabytes. Combined with upgrades like DLSS 3 and advanced ray tracing, even small specification changes can have an outsized impact. And Nvidia seems confident the new 4070 SUPER will deliver exactly that when it drops January 17.
