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 more 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.