pre-release scalping/placeholder prices have been wrong almost 100% of the time they're brought up. they're absolute staples of the twitter leaker crowd who has absolutely nothing better to do, but they have been wrong almost every time. Literally there were rumors of intel MSRP adjustments for every series since 7th gen, 8th/9th/10th/11th/12th/13th have all had dumb "i7 is now $449! i9 is now $749!" type headlines every single time. Some random hole-in-the-wall computer shop in singapore does not have secret pre-launch info, it's just a placeholder/safely-high scalping price because they know it'll sell out on launch day anyway.

What I expect is:

* 4080 super won't be much of a performance step, but it'll probably move downwards from $1200 to $999. Could even be $899.

* 4070 Ti will be retired and replaced with 4070 Ti Super at the same MSRP. Not much faster, but it'll go from 12GB to 16GB, so NVIDIA will finally have an midrange 16GB option. Upper-midrange to be sure but it's not $1200 either.

* 4070 will likely move down to the $499 price point and 4070 Super takes the $599 or $629 price point. This should be ~95% of a 4070 Ti 12GB at 80% of the price.

It's possible that 4070/4070 Super are a little bit more, the viable range is like $499-549 and $599-649 respectively, if 4070 Ti Super comes in at (eg) $799 and 4080 Super at $999. But in general this whole refresh is strongly constrained by the 4070 Ti Super needing to hit the $749 price point, plus 4070 needing to compete with 7800XT.

AMD actually went pretty hard on the 7800XT, $499 is a good price for that, and it gets you 16GB in a 4070-class card (5% faster than 4070[0]). NVIDIA needs a 16GB card that is not $1200 - or even $999. It's really got to be $749 or at absolute most $799. That sku can only be AD103, so they need to stop using the harvested dies for 4070 Ti and start using them for 4070 Ti Super. That's why 4070 Ti is being retired - those rumors make perfect sense. They can't use AD102 because to hit 4080 Super shader count they'd have to cut >40% of the die and that's a total waste, and they're using every AD102 for AI cards right now. They can't use AD104 because it's only 12GB.

The rest of the pieces fall into place around that. 4070 Ti has to (largely) go away, except for truly failed chips (and these are also used in Quadro 4000 Ada, which is 20GB). 4080 gets a refresh to use the full-die AD103 chips, but it's not worth more than $999 if there is a lower-tier 16GB model, and it could even be $899. AD104 gets the full-die 4070 Super slotted underneath the 4070 Ti Super. 4070 probably needs a small price cut ($499) to compete with 7800XT (and it still only has 12GB, but NVIDIA always does position at a small premium), so 4070 Super has to slot somewhere between those $499 and $749 cards. Which probably means $599. 4080 pricing (the only AD103) was always the most incredibly silly of the whole lineup, so they have the most room to come down. They totally could do 4080 super for $899 if they wanted, the margins are ridiculous on that chip. $749 for 4070 Ti 16GB with AD103 cutdown is super plausible too.

I know everyone is convinced that NVIDIA is going to just keep raising prices forever, but please consider the possibility that the people doing that pitchfork-brigade are just rabble-rousing. The problem is that so many people have bought into the nvidia-bashing over time that it seems reasonable and seems common-sense but it's really not. It is just like last summer before Ada launched, when everyone was absolutely positive that 4090 was going to be 600W, then 800W, finally 900W TBP [1][2][3]. People unironically argued that shrinking two nodes wouldn't buy NVIDIA absolutely anything in terms of efficiency improvements and 4090 was just going to be 3090 perf/w but higher perf. NVIDIA is not going to just stack the supers on top of the existing stuff, there will be some combination of price cuts and faster skus and (for 4070 Ti super) a VRAM increase. 4070 and 4070 Super represent a 15-20% improvement from MSRP and 4070/4070 Ti were alright to begin with, and the 16GB 4070 Ti sku is as good as they can do for a value-oriented 16GB sku with AD102 out of the picture. 4080 Super will continue to undeniably be one of the graphics cards of all time, but there is a price where it makes sense for the performance step too.

People get absolutely silly and buy into the wildest, most nonsensical bullshit as long as it feeds the "green man bad" itch. And they eagerly believe and overhype the most nonsensical pro-AMD bullshit (Zen2[4], fury x, vega, and RDNA3 being the most extreme, but it happens every time to some degree). And there is a whole little media ecosystem devoted to feeding this and catering to it - it's not called "green gaming tech" after all. Many people are generally resentful and bitter about NVIDIA and eagerly soak it up and amplify it. A lot of people have low-key adopted pro-AMD fanboy attitudes and framing (or bashing other brands, like the absurd amount of denial about apple silicon performance/efficiency, at first, or tiger lake/ice lake efficiency, etc), without even realizing it or really thinking of themselves as pro-AMD. It's kinda just the sea in which we swim, on tech-focused social media. PCMR is completely crazy pro-AMD shit all the time f.ex (which makes sense when you see the head mod! [5]).

Like I said, there's a lot of people who are just unhappy that a 4070 isn't $299, the "socially gamer, fiscally conservative" crowd, and they're just kinda gonna continue being unhappy. The overall cost trend is up, it's still an overall fairly cheap hobby, but a high-end GPU with x mm^2 of silicon costs legitimately quite a bit more to design + validate + build now, and it's going to continue to go up in the future. The flip benefit is that hardware ages slower too, and NVIDIA has provided pretty good forward-support for DLSS that will soon be baselined by the switch 2's T239 chip. I fully expect some CUDA-like lifecycle where after 5+ years they may launch "DLSS Hyper Resolution" that uses some new accelerator, but I think they probably won't pull support for older cards etc and the switch 2 commits them to pretty significant ongoing work on Ampere era hardware (possibly with an Ada OFA?). That's the reason they've been on a tear with DLSS 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 (coming soon) all boosting image quality at very low input resolutions+framerates. DLSS needs to run real good on Switch for upscaling those 3rd party ports in docked mode.

But 4070 and 4070 Super should receive some good pricing and 4070 Ti Super finally gets a decent card with DLSS and tensor and 16GB that isn't $1200. I think I was right. That's not an overall bad adjustment, and NVIDIA can't really do a big price cut on AD102 right now due to AI mania, so that's as good as it's gonna get. 4090 dipping below MSRP (got to ~$1400-1450 iirc) was truly the bottom for this gen, I think.

Hopefully there are some lower-end SKUs too, but I think NVIDIA is constrained by a fairly large inventory of 4060 Ti 8GB that they're managing carefully. The 16GB SKU was a last-minute thing, they had already built out a ton of 8GB and they need to let the market absorb them before nuking the price too bad (or else partners get rekt). The 4060 Ti 8GB models have already dropped a ton in street price, they are decently faster and at some point they're worth it too. Rumors are contradictory on this too but Gigabyte EEC filings just disclosed a 7600XT 16GB, which sounds like it'd be based on the Navi 33 die. Deep cuts on Navi 32 parts have always seemed problematic to me due to overall wafer usage (it gets hit hard because it's MCM, it's as much 6nm silicon as a 7600 or somesuch, and also another big piece of 5nm) at the $300-350 price point etc, but N33 7600XT as simply clamshell-memory 7600 is doable and believable and would undercut the 4060 Ti decently. They could offer a 7600XT at $300/$329 for sure. So they may have to do a 4060 super/Ti adjustment at some point regardless.

But the reason AMD isn't just massively undercutting NVIDIA is because they don't have a magic wand on cost either. The economics of a 7700 non-XT will be interesting, I think that's really a lot of silicon to use for not a lot of margin (vs selling datacenter/mobile chips), I think the 7700 would be tough at (eg) $349, but who knows with AMD. The N31 design seems to be where the MCM really hits its stride in terms of scalability being worth the area hit vs monolithic, the power consequences, etc, and they could probably drop both 7800XT and 7900XT prices if needed against 4070 or 4070 Ti Super.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/16guxrk/amd_radeo...

[1] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-fe... (citing kopite7kimi, one of the twitter leaker crowd)

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-readies-...

[3] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-40-graphics-card-rum...

[4] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tech-Analyst-AdoredTV-leaks-al...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv9SLtojkTU (this whole video is really good but 18:12 is the real reason people are upset, people want raster to keep scaling even though there's good reasons that it isn't, and working smarter not harder - increasing asymptotic performance-per-transistor - is the only way forward. DLSS would seem like a magic "more frames button" 10 years ago but it's so controversial now for absurd reasons. That video from Steve GN in another comment I made is so incredibly hyperbolic and absurd and that's the thing, a ton of people just lost their shit over the RTX launch and still haven't recovered.)