Enlarge / Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition is dwarfed by the 4090 and 4080 design, though third-party GPU makers can make bigger cards if they want. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Its specs have been thoroughly leaked for anyone paying close attention, but today Nvidia is making it official: It’s launching its GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card for a starting price of $599. This GPU will be the cheapest way to buy into Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPU family, which, in addition to better performance and power efficiency, gets you access to Nvidia’s DLSS 3 upscaling and frame-generation features and hardware acceleration for AV1 video encoding. Cards will be available from Nvidia and other partners starting on April 13th.

Nvidia’s Founders Edition card is significantly smaller than its RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs, with a relatively svelte dual-slot cooler that will easily fit into most PC cases. GPUs made by Nvidia’s partners can (and will) be more expensive and physically larger, and some of them will also come with 8-pin PCI Express power connectors rather than the newer but somewhat controversial 12VHPWR power connector that Nvidia uses.

The RTX 4070 is $100 more expensive than the $499 starting price of the RTX 3070 and RTX 2070, which were $120 more expensive than the $379 starting price of the GTX 1070. Even accounting for inflation since 2016 ($379 in 2016 is roughly $475 now), it continues a tradition of bumping up the price for GPUs with the same relative position in Nvidia’s lineup, something Nvidia partially (and not untruthfully) justifies by pointing out how much faster its modern graphics cards are.