NVIDIA's RTX4070 10GB Prototype Card Weaker Performance but with More CUDA Cores

TapTechNews July 16th news, although the currently sold RTX4070 has 12GB of GDDR6X video memory and a 192-bit interface, NVIDIA had earlier developed a model with only 10GB of video memory and weaker performance.

A Xianyu user @GOUYII now shares a set of GPU-Z screenshots and real photos of the RTX4070 10GB prototype card, giving us a chance to see the original appearance of this abandoned scheme.

GPU-Z shows that this graphics card uses the AD104-275 GPU, in which six 32-bit memory controllers on the AD104 chip are disabled, so only a 160-bit width is retained, and together with five 2GB GDDR6 video memory chips, it has a total capacity of 10GB (18 Gbps).

As a result, this graphics card has severely limited bandwidth and capacity, with a bandwidth of only 420 GB/s, which is 16.7% lower than the existing RTX4070 (TapTechNews note: launched in April 2023).

Relatively, this 10GB prototype card provides more CUDA cores to compensate for the insufficiency of VRAM and bandwidth. GPU-Z shows that it has 7168 CUDA cores, 1280 more than the ordinary RTX4070, which is exactly the same as the later launched RTX4070 Super.

In addition, there are eight memory soldering positions on the PCB of this prototype card, indicating that NVIDIA may have very likely introduced the reference design of the AD103 (RTX4080) board at that time.

Related reading:

The Hidden History: The Early Development Version of NVIDIA's GTX2070 Graphics Card Exposed, Can Be Flashed with RTX2070 Firmware