Enlarge / Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 is here. It’s the company’s first launch in over a year of a graphics card that could charitably be described as “mainstream,” both in performance and in price. It costs $600.

It’s not productive to keep going back to the also-$600 GTX 1080, at the time the fastest graphics card you could buy anywhere from anyone, and wondering how we got here from there (some of it is inflation, not all of it). But I keep doing it as a reminder that $600 is still more than many people pay for their entire PC, tablet, smartphone, or high-end game console. No other component in a gaming PC has seen its price shoot up like this over the same span of time; a Core i5 CPU cost around $200 in 2016 and costs around $200 now, and RAM and SSDs are both historically cheap at the moment.

To review the 4070 is to simultaneously be impressed by it as a product while also being frustrated with the conditions that led us to an “impressive” $600 midrange graphics card. It’s pretty fast, very efficient, and much more reasonably sized than other recent Nvidia GPUs. In today’s topsy-turvy graphics card market, I could even describe it as a good deal. But if you’re still yearning for the days when you could spend $300 or less on a reasonably performant GPU with the latest architecture and modern features, keep waiting.