Just last week, rumors emerged of Nvidia working on a new variant of the RTX 4070 that uses slightly slower GDDR6 memory, instead of the usual GDDR6X. Now, a new rumor suggests these new Nvidia RTX 4070 GDDR6 cards could be appearing on shop shelves as soon as next week.
The move to slightly change the VRAM configuration of one of the best graphics card options you can buy right now is a seemingly strange one but has apparently been forced by a shortage of GDDR6X RAM. As such, Nvidia and its partners have apparently had to work on a solution that allows for one of its more affordable and popular cards to continue being sold.
Given just how recently the RTX 4070 GDDR6 story broke, it’s surprising to see just how quickly we could find the new cards on shop shelves. At least that’s if the report from Taiwanese tech site, Board Channels, is to be believed.
Specifically, the (machine translated) report states that “the RTX4070 […] may be in short supply until at least the 20th. The new supply of RTX4070 GDDR6 memory will probably arrive after the 20th, and the supply may gradually ease.”
Not only is the use of the word “probably” indicative of how speculative this report is but the general talk here is of supply, which could refer to the supply of the cards arriving in shops but could also mean the supply of the memory to the card manufacturers, in which case it could be a long time before those products are shipped around the world.
Nonetheless, it’s possible that as soon as next week we could see new versions of the RTX 4070 become available. Notably, the Gamescom trade show takes place next week, and we’re expecting there to be a host of big gaming tech announcements, so this date would correspond well with that event.
There’s no indication of whether the new GDRR6 cards will be slightly cheaper than the GDDR6X cards. Given the GDRR6 models are expected to have around 5% slower memory performance, it would be a very disappointing move if Nvidia and its partners just swapped out the memory without making any changes to the card’s name or price.
While we wait to find out just what is about to happen to the world’s supply of RTX 4070 cards, why not check out what we know so far about Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs via our RTX 5090 guide.