It’s now been a couple of months since Nvidia launched its RTX 40 Super-series of graphics cards. The RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super were welcome, if only evolutionary upgrades over their non-Super predecessors. I’ve written about how the lower tier RTX 40 cards were the ones that really deserved the Super treatment, and according to a new report from a reputable leaker, the RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti and a little more surprisingly, the RTX 4070 are in line for an update.
According to a table posted by MEGAsizeGPU (via PCgamesN), the GeForce RTX 4060, 4060 Ti, and 4070 GPU are set to ship with new GPUs. That’s great right? Apparently not, as the new GPUs are likely to be nothing more than harvested dies that have the same specs as the GPUs they’re replacing.
The current RTX 4060 is built with the AD107 GPU. The new variant will come with the AD106, which is the chip that powers the RTX 4060 Ti. In turn the updated RTX 4060 Ti will ship with the AD104 GPU. You guessed it: that’s the chip used in the RTX 4070. The updated RTX 4070 will include the AD103 chip, which is used for the RTX 4080.
If Nvidia was feeling generous, each of the new cards could include an increase in shader, ray tracing or Tensor core counts, more memory, or a wider bus, but sadly it seems as though the new chips will be cut down to mimic the specs of the GPUs they are replacing. So in the end, there won’t be any change.
If these specs turn out to be accurate, there’s really no upgrade here at all. We’d all like to see gamers get a little something extra for their dollar. Not that Nvidia is under much pressure to do so. The green team holds a commanding market share lead, and as long as its cards continue to sell well, it won’t be feeling pressured into releasing real Super upgrades. That, and it’s making uncounted billions from the AI side of its business.
Of all the cards in the RTX 40-series range, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is the one that would benefit most from an upgrade. It’s still too expensive compared to the 8GB version, and giving it a performance bump over the 8GB version would go a long way to justifying its higher price.
We’re likely at least a year away from the release of Blackwell based mid-range cards, so there is still time for Nvidia to release some kind of Super upgrade for the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti. For all the hype, there’s only so much DLSS and Frame Generation can do. Performance at native resolutions is still important.
This isn’t the first time Nvidia has introduced a mid-life GPU swap. The RTX 3060 12GB is a recent example. The original RTX 3060 was built with the GA106 GPU, with 3,584 shader units, 28 RT cores and 112 Tensor cores. Later, Nvidia released a version with the larger GA104 GPU, with specs that were identical—almost. It did get an increase in ROP count from 48 to 64. So, going by recent history, I hold out some hope that there will be changes under the hood of these ‘new’ RTX 40-series cards.