Tuesday, May 9th 2023
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Variant Could be Refreshed With AD103 GPU
Hardware tipster kopite7kimi has learned from insider sources that a variant of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 graphic card could be lined up with a different GPU - the AD103 instead of the currently utilized AD104-derived AD104-250-A1. The Ada Lovelace-based architecture is a staple across the RTX 40-series of graphics cards, but a fully unlocked AD103 is not yet attached to any product on the market - it will be a strange move for NVIDIA to refresh or expand the mid-range RTX 4070 lineup with a much larger GPU, albeit in a reduced form. A cut down variant of the AD103 is currently housed within NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card - its AD103-300-A1 GPU has 9728 CUDA Cores and Team Green's engineers have chosen to disable 5% of the full article's capabilities.
The hardware boffins will need to do a lot of pruning if the larger GPU ends up on the rumored RTX 4070 sort-of upgrade - the SKU's 5,888 CUDA core count spec would require a 42% reduction in GPU potency. It is somewhat curious that the RTX 4070 Ti has not been mentioned by the tipster - you would think that the more powerful card (than the standard 4070) would be the logical and immediate candidate for this type of treatment. In theory NVIDIA could be re-purposing dies that do not meet RTX 4080-level standards, thus salvaging rejected material and repurposing it for step down card models.According to TPU's GPU database the NVIDIA AD103: "uses the Ada Lovelace architecture and is made using a 5 nm production process at TSMC. With a die size of 379 mm² and a transistor count of 45,900 million it is a large chip. AD103 supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12_2). For GPU compute applications, OpenCL version 3.0 and CUDA 8.9 can be used. Additionally, the DirectX 12 Ultimate capability guarantees support for hardware-ray tracing, variable-rate shading and more, in upcoming video games. It features 10240 shading units, 320 texture mapping units and 112 ROPs. Also included are 320 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications. The GPU also contains 80 ray tracing acceleration cores."Further reading: Ada Architecture Whitepaper
The hardware boffins will need to do a lot of pruning if the larger GPU ends up on the rumored RTX 4070 sort-of upgrade - the SKU's 5,888 CUDA core count spec would require a 42% reduction in GPU potency. It is somewhat curious that the RTX 4070 Ti has not been mentioned by the tipster - you would think that the more powerful card (than the standard 4070) would be the logical and immediate candidate for this type of treatment. In theory NVIDIA could be re-purposing dies that do not meet RTX 4080-level standards, thus salvaging rejected material and repurposing it for step down card models.According to TPU's GPU database the NVIDIA AD103: "uses the Ada Lovelace architecture and is made using a 5 nm production process at TSMC. With a die size of 379 mm² and a transistor count of 45,900 million it is a large chip. AD103 supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12_2). For GPU compute applications, OpenCL version 3.0 and CUDA 8.9 can be used. Additionally, the DirectX 12 Ultimate capability guarantees support for hardware-ray tracing, variable-rate shading and more, in upcoming video games. It features 10240 shading units, 320 texture mapping units and 112 ROPs. Also included are 320 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications. The GPU also contains 80 ray tracing acceleration cores."Further reading: Ada Architecture Whitepaper