The end of the Nvidia RTX 4000 series is near – the RTX 4070 is expected to sell out within weeks
- Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is expected to sell out by the end of this month
- RTX 4060 Ti and 4060 models will still be available through third-party manufacturers in February
- Suggestions seem plausible considering RTX 5070 will be launched in February
With the unveiling of Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series GPUs at CES 2025, a lot of attention has been focused on Team Green’s affordable RTX 5070, which Nvidia says will rival the much more expensive (at launch) RTX 4090 (when using DLSS 4 with Frame Generation enabled ) – and it looks like its predecessor, the RTX 4070, could soon disappear from the GPU market.
As reported by VideoCardzMultiple posts on the Board Channels forum (used by people to talk about PC hardware supply and demand updates) suggest that the RTX 4070 will be completely sold out by the end of January. The same is expected for the RTX 4060 Ti and 4060, with only AIC brands (third-party GPU manufacturers) still having stock for those GPUs in February.
This comes after months of speculation before the RTX 5000 series was unveiled, which indicated that Nvidia was moving away from production of the full RTX 4000 series. Considering the RTX 5080 and 5090 are launching on January 30, along with the RTX 5070 launch in February, this lines up well with these rumors – we saw a similar pattern play out at least a year before the launch of the RTX 4000 series , with the RTX 3000 series shortcomings.
Does this mean you should upgrade to an RTX 5000 series GPU?
If these rumors are legit, this might be one of the last chances to get your hands on an RTX 4070 while you still can. But if you’re still using an RTX 2000 or 3000 series GPU, I can recommend the jump to an RTX 5070, as you’ll have access to Multi Frame Generation, which promises to be an improvement over Nvidia’s previous version of Frame Generation, with up to three more AI-generated frames, which can dramatically increase frame rates.
We’re still waiting to see how the new GPUs will perform, but with the benefit of the new Multi Frame Generation feature, I expect performance to certainly be impressive (albeit with the potential of more input latency despite Nvidia’s Reflex 2).
As I mentioned earlier, RTX 2000 and 3000 series GPU owners have not had access to the full suite of DLSS 3 offerings (particularly Frame Generation, exclusive to the RTX 4000 series) with access to the super resolution of DLSS 3 and the addition of DLSS 3.5 specifically aimed at providing better image quality for ray tracing in select titles (available for all RTX GPUs) such as Cyberpunk 2077 using improved denoisers. This reduces ghosting and also improves dynamic illumination in sequences where ray tracing reflections are possible, thanks to ray reconstruction.
In a pleasantly surprising move, Nvidia has made DLSS 4 available for all RTX GPUs, instead of making it exclusive to the RTX 5000 series. However, the RTX 2000 and 3000 series GPUs will continue to lack Frame Generation, while the RTX 4000 series will continue to generate only a single AI frame.
DLSS and Frame Generation are two tools that are becoming increasingly important for running graphically intensive games at high frame rates, and it has allowed less powerful GPUs to deliver the kind of performance we would once expect from flagship cards. This means the RTX 5070 has the potential to be the most affordable RTX 5000 series GPU by offering great performance, especially with DLSS 4, at a much more affordable price starting at $579 / £579 / AU$1,109.