Nvidia offers AI-powered gaming chip at $599

Nvidia said it is packing one of its mid-range chips for gamers with more artificial intelligence (AI) features to improve graphics.
Nvidia RTX 4070 chipNvidia will start shipping of the RTX 4070 chip on Thursday. The price of the RTX 4070 chip will be $599, putting it near the middle of the company’s range of graphics processing units (GPUs), which list for up to $1,600.

The chip that it updates, the RTX 3060, is the fourth most popular gaming chip on the market, according to survey data in March from game distribution platform Steam.

“With prices starting at $599, the RTX 4070 is an amazing upgrade for gamers running on previous-generation GPUs,” Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at NVIDIA, said in a news statement.

Features of RTX 4070 chip

The RTX 4070 chip allows the latest games such as A Plague Tale: Requiem, Dying Light 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and other demanding titles to run at over 100 frames per second, thanks to DLSS 3, as well as games such as Battlefield 2042, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy that support DLSS 2.

With DLSS 3, AI-powered frame generation creates new, high-quality frames for smoother gameplay, rendering seven out of every eight pixels in a scene. NVIDIA Reflex reduces input lag between devices and monitors.

Ray-tracing performance has significantly improved, thanks to advancements like Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Opacity Micromap, and Displaced Micro-Mesh Engines. These innovations enable even the most demanding games to implement multiple ray-tracing effects or even full ray tracing, also known as path tracing, for unparalleled realism and immersion.

This potent combination of third-generation ray tracing and DLSS has resulted in a 16x leap in ray-tracing operations per pixel over the past five years. Adoption rates have soared, with over 400 RTX games and applications available, with adoption of DLSS 3 happening 7x faster than its predecessor.

Compared to the RTX 2070 SUPER, the GeForce RTX 4070 is on average 2.6x faster with DLSS 3, and on average 1.4x faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 with DLSS 3.

DLSS 3 provides Ada Lovelace GPUs with a tremendous performance boost, but the GeForce RTX 4070 also excels in traditional games that do not include more advanced features such as ray tracing and DLSS.

The GeForce RTX 4070 is on par with the GeForce RTX 3080 while running at nearly half the power — and offering an additional 2GB of memory. Additionally, the RTX 4070’s memory subsystem has been enhanced with 36MB of L2 cache and 12GB of ultra-high-speed GDDR6X memory.

Nvidia’s data center chips for training artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT have powered the company’s revenue growth in recent years. Nvidia generated about a third of its $26.9 billion in fiscal 2023 revenue from gaming chips, though gaming revenue was down by 27 percent, dragged down by a sagging overall PC market.

Nvidia’s chips help PC video games render images on to high-resolution screens more quickly to make games look more realistic. The 4070 chips will be the cheapest available that use Nvidia’s newest AI technology to do so.

Rather than calculate precisely what the value of each pixel on a screen should be, which can take extra time, the newest Nvidia gaming chips use artificial intelligence to predict what about seven out of every eight pixels should be, including generating entire frames using AI.

GeForce RTX 4070 GPU comes backed by the NVIDIA Studio platform, which enables content creators to work faster and smarter with RTX acceleration and AI tools.

3D modelers rendering 4K scenes with the AI-powered DLSS 3 in NVIDIA Omniverse — a hub to interconnect existing 3D workflows, replacing linear pipelines with live-sync creation for real-time collaboration — can expect 2.8x faster performance than with last generation’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.

Broadcasters deploying the eighth-generation NVIDIA video encoder NVENC, with support for AV1, will enjoy 40 percent better efficiency. Livestreams will appear as if bitrate was increased by 40 percent — a big boost in image quality for popular broadcast apps like OBS Studio. AV1 is supported in Discord with a full release coming to YouTube via OBS Studio soon.

Video editors will see 20 percent faster video export speeds, thanks to the eighth-generation NVIDIA encoder on the GeForce RTX 4070, along with AV1 incorporated into top video editing apps.