Gamers are reportedly not rushing out to buy the latest Nvidia mid-range GPU, with GeForce RTX 4070 Super sales being described as a “disaster” by Nvidia graphics card maker, and scalpers reportedly canceling their orders. The new GPU was launched earlier this week for $599, adding more cores and faster clock speeds to the original RTX 4070 specs to improve gaming performance, but the new launch doesn’t look like it’s going well.
You can read all about this new Nvidia GPU in our full RTX 4070 Super review, where we gave it a score of eight out of ten, making it one of the best graphics card options. It wasn’t a clean win, though. The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is still a very strong competitor, coming with a full 16GB of VRAM for much less money, and it’s only the superior ray tracing abilities and widespread DLSS 3 support that (just) make the RTX 4070 Super a better buy.
There certainly haven’t been any of the stock shortages we’ve seen with some other recent Nvidia GPU launches, and several models are still available and in stock for the $599 MSRP on retailers such as NewEgg. What’s more, tech YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead has quoted several sources in a video (which you can see below), including retailers, board partners, and even scalpers, claiming that RTX 4070 Super sales have been disappointing.
“Dude, 4070 Super sales are a DISASTER,” said one board partner, adding that “frankly we are getting fed up with being told to push models over MSRP while Nvidia gets to sell Founders Editions from their website.” Several retailers are also quoted, with one anonymous large retailer saying that sales were lower than those of the original, and obscenely overpriced, GeForce RTX 4080, and that it was only the MSRP models that were selling.
Another retailer said that not a single person came into the store or called about the RTX 4070 Super on launch day, while another said it had “actually rejected an offer to receive ~200 4070 Supers from an AIB this week.” The reason given shows a recurring theme between the responses, which is that no one is interested in paying for souped-up, overclocked cards with loads of RGB lighting in this price range. “We had a feeling it would be nearly impossible to get gamers in 2024 to buy a 12GB GPU above $600,” says the retailer.
Even scalpers are regretting charging their bots into online stores to inhale as many RTX 4070 Super cards as possible. “It was really easy for us to buy 4070 Supers today on BestBuy.com & Nvidia’s website,” says a representative of a scalper collective, but adds that “we’ll be canceling most of our orders after seeing the bad sales…expect more Founders to pop up soon!”
What’s gone wrong here? Moore’s Law is Dead has a theory, suggesting that “Nvidia’s arrogance and stubbornness has led them to fixing the card in the wrong way,” and that what the RTX 4070 Super really needed was more VRAM and a cheaper price. “In 2024, 12GB feels smaller than it did in 2023,” he says, pointing to the RTX 4070 Super’s performance falling off a cliff in Alan Wake 2 at 4K with ray tracing enabled.
However, the RTX 4070 Super is designed to be a mid-range GPU for gaming at 2,560 x 1,440, and the GPU wouldn’t be powerful enough to run this game at these settings anyway. Even with 16GB of VRAM it still wouldn’t hit a playable frame rate – the RTX 4080 only averages 32.7fps with these settings. At the moment, 12GB of VRAM is (just about) enough to cope with most of the gaming scenarios you would throw at the RTX 4070 Super, but there’s not much headroom for future proofing, and that tightness is disappointing if you’ve spent $599 on a graphics card.
There’s some truth about the pricing and timing here too. It wasn’t that long ago that Nvidia 70-series cards cost under $400, and a $599 card with only 12GB of VRAM in 2024 doesn’t look like good value now. What’s more, a $699 overclocked card with this spec looks even worse, even if it does have DLSS 3 support and better ray tracing performance than the Radeon RX 7800 XT. Plus, people generally don’t have much money to spend in January after the holidays.
It’s not all bad news for Nvidia, though. The Founders Edition has sold out at Nvidia’s online store now, and not every retailer tells the same bleak story either. Elan Raja, CEO of massive UK tech retailer Scan Computers told us that “the RTX 4070 Super has been a great launch at Scan. We’re pleased to have been able to get it in the hands of so many gamers.”
Nvidia is launching two other new Super GPUs this month, the RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super, and we’ll be reviewing them as soon as they’re out, so keep an eye on our reviews to see how they perform.