Looks like Nvidia has effectively cut the RTX 4070 price to $550 in response to the RX 7800 XT

With so many retailers and manufacturers suddenly dropping the card to $550 it's hard to believe it's not somehow incentivised by Nvidia.

The Nvidia RTX 4070 looks like it’s effectively had its base price cut from $600 down to $550 as a host of retailers and manufacturers are now offering cards for a new cut-down price. And one of them is a frickin’ Across the Spider-Verse card.

Our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware spotted the trend, and this is certainly in response to the reception given the recent AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, which launched at $500 and was warmly received. I mean, I liked it, but that’s mostly because it was a full $100 cheaper than the RTX 4070 and performed as well, if not better in a lot of games.

But at just $50—a price delta completely swallowed up by most third-party RX 7800 XT cards—it’s not quite so compelling. It’s frame rate advantage is modest in most cases, that 16GB GDDR6 isn’t so convincing against the RTX 4070’s 12GB GDDR6X, and is significantly disadvantaged when it comes to any game that heavily features ray tracing.

Plus, the RTX 4070 gets DLSS 3 (soon to be updated to v3.5 with Ray Reconstruction) and the magic of Frame Generation, too. Both of those things are very much boons to the GeForce card and when the price is so close those extra features start to become far more tantalising.

At the moment there are three $550 RTX 4070 cards on Newegg.com ready to go, from Zotac, MSI, and Gigabyte, plus a Gigabyte card available in certain Best Buy stores. There is an Asus card listed on B&H Photo, as well as the same Gigabyte card, though both are currently out of stock.

The fact that the big manufacturers are all listing cards at $550, and at multiple retailers, means that it would be hard not to presume Nvidia itself was behind this sudden price cut. Whether that’s a rebate for retailers or manufacturers, or some other incentive, we would be surprised if it was something cooked up without major input from the green team.

Interestingly, though, there is no discount on the Founders Edition card from Best Buy, where it is still on sale today for the original $600 MSRP.

And if you’re buying a graphics card right now, well this is arguably your best bet, because at the moment the competing RX 7800 XT is out of stock at its $500 base price, with only a few higher priced options currently available.

So far we’ve not seen this price drop replicated in the UK, so it might well just be a US-only promotion. At least, for now.