I love how the internet is full of people that apparently know the future. If that's true, I hope they're all trillionaires, because I sure don't know what will happen in the coming two weeks, never mind two months.
What we know is that the official base price as defined by Nvidia for the RTX 5070 Ti is $749. Is it going to go for that much when it goes on sale tomorrow? Of course not — except in limited quantities. This is the same thing that happens with every new generation of GPUs, going back well over a decade. There's excitement and price gouging and increased demand at launch, prices spike up, but once the initial surge in upgrades dies off the prices stabilize and tend to fall back closer to MSRP.
Where things get messy is when stuff like cryptocurrency mining and AI enter the picture. Ethereum screwed up GPU prices for several years. First we had all the Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs selling at double or triple MSRP, and then we got sequels that increased generational pricing and still sold. And then along comes AI and helps to support those price decisions. Meanwhile, the cost of creating and manufacturing cutting edge silicon keeps going up. And so we should expect the performance per dollar to not change radically these days.
$750 for what amounts to slightly less than 4080 / 4080 Super performance? Yeah, that looks about right. I can live with that and say it's a reasonable offering. But then we get a bunch of true influencers yelling at the clouds and saying how it's all lies, because anger and resentment drives video views!
The difference between me and an angry YouTuber is that I don't get paid directly by page views. If I had a monetized YouTube channel and I got double the views and double the pay by taking an angry approach and having the right thumbnail, I'm sure I'd be doing the same junk. But as a salaried journalist? I get to sit back, look at the big picture, and say what I think without worrying about whether it will earn me more money or not. Literally, it's the exact opposite of what many contend. YouTubers who get paid directly for views are more beholden to marketing tactics (including the "be angry at everything" approach) than I am.
As stated in the conclusion, this really comes down to the actual street prices, and we won't know what those are for at least a couple of months. Yes, cards go on sale tomorrow. Yes, they're going to sell out. Just like the GTX 970 and GTX 980 sold out at launch in 2014, and every new high-end GPU from Nvidia between then and now. So we can't make a snap judgement about how a GPU ranks based on the first few weeks of its two years shelf life!
The 5070 Ti isn't amazing. It's moderately faster than its predecessor (looking at the 4070 Ti), for ostensibly less money. There are also clearly still some driver issues, probably because the number of INT32 ALUs was doubled and perhaps the AI Management Processor isn't balancing things properly, I don't know. I expect all of the currently negative performance deltas relative to the 4070 Ti Super will get fixed in the next couple of months with driver updates, but Nvidia is still busy trying to roll out more new GPUs and so things get back burnered.
If the 5070 Ti costs more than $750, that makes it less compelling. Don't buy it if it costs too much for what you get! Certainly don't buy the $1,000+ models that are being hawked at launch, because that's not where this GPU belongs. It's a good card with 16GB of VRAM at what should be a reasonable price. Just like removing 4GB of the memory would change the picture, so does increasing the price by $250. But I'm not going to base my review of the hardware on what may very well be — what should be — short-term price gouging.
Fundamentally, RTX 5070 Ti is slower than the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super in most benchmarks. That's fine, and it's why it's supposed to cost less. 4080 and 4080 Super cards were available for under $1,000 much of last year, and there's no good reason for the 5070 Ti to cost more than that. The reason it will, in the short term, is due to the supply chain.
Nvidia stopped RTX 40-series production too early, Blackwell got delayed, inventory dried up, prices went up, and we're still living in that state. It will take months for things to get smoothed out, but eventually it will happen. Just like eventually all the cryptocurrency GPU mining died out. On paper, 10~15 percent more performance, plus new features, for 7% less money is a reasonable offer. If retail outlets try to increase the price by 20%? Yeah, that's stupid and you shouldn't buy it at those prices. That is all.
Nvidia doesn't pay me one red cent to say anything. I get a card for review, yes, which belongs to my employer. If my article gets a ton of traffic? Future earns more advertising money and potentially more ecommerce money. If it does terrible? Future earns less money. Either way, I get paid exactly the same amount. I have no reason to push a false narrative. I get to write what I think, and the chips fall where they will. Yes, higher traffic and engagement makes me happy on some level, because it means people are reading the content I produced, but my salary stays the same.
Am I wrong about the MSRP? No. It is what it is. Will cards actually get down to the MSRP sooner than later? I don't know, and the review text is very clear that if prices are higher, that makes this card less interesting. That's why it's listed as a con. The 4-star score is basically just a subjective value that can't possibly hope to encapsulate the nearly 10,000 words of text and hundreds of hours of benchmarking. Just as the pros and cons are just a few key highlights and can't possibly convey everything you need to know.
TLDR: Please don't try to pigeonhole reviewers just because they put up a number that you don't like, or because you think the unknown future will be bad. Value is intrinsically linked to price, and in the coming weeks I'm sure we'll have dozens more articles talking about GPU prices and relative values. And at some point I'll get the time to actually properly update the best graphics cards list and GPU hierarchy, as things will calm down a bit once the 9060 and 5060 cards are out the door. Which is probably several months away. Sigh.
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