Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti GPU specs have supposedly leaked and I'm not sure if I'm excited or exasperated

Everyone's favourite Nvidia specs leaker, Kopite7kimi, has just done the deed on Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti with a fairly comprehensive spec dump (via Videocardz).

To cut to the chase, we're talking 8,960 CUDA cores and a board power of 300 W. For context, the current RTX 4070 Ti sports 7,680 cores and 285 W rating. On paper, that makes the new GPU a fairly marginal upgrade.

The CUDA core increase represents a mere 17% bump, which is an awfully modest upgrade given a two-year wait. However, the critical detail missing here is clockspeed. The 4070 Ti has a 2,610 MHz Boost speed. The new 5070 Ti could up that significantly.

The 5070 Ti is also said to be based on the same GB203 silicon as the upcoming and similarly rumoured RTX 5080, though that chip is expected to have more of the die enabled, with 10,752 CUDA cores.

The arguable catch here is that the whole RTX 50 family is expected to be built on TSMC's N4 silicon node. That's a derivation of the N5 technology used for the RTX 40 family, not a properly new node like TSMC's various N3 nodes. That doesn't necessarily bode well for a huge frequency uplift, even if N4 ought to enable at least some improvement over N5 for clocks.

Of course, the other major imponderable is the Blackwell architecture inside the RTX 50 cards. For now, little is known about any fundamental changes that could, for instance, see a Blackwell CUDA core do more work per clock cycle than the Ada Lovelace spec cores in the 4070 Ti.

In other words, if you combine the 17% CUDA core bump with a decent clockspeed improvement and more work done per clock, you could end up with a fairly hefty overall gen-on-gen performance uplift. Or not. It's all to be proven.

All that said, what this will all likely come down to is pricing. If the 5070 Ti ends up dramatically faster than the 4070 Ti but also costs dramatically more, that won't be great. On the other hand, even if the 5070 Ti only brings a small performance benefit, it could still be really appealing if it's cheap enough.

Yeah, OK, a cheap Nvidia GPU. Ha ha. But one can only hope. In the meantime, all indications are that the release timing gap between really high-end Blackwell GPUs and mid-to-high rangers like the 5070 Ti could be smaller than previous generations.

We're expecting the RTX 5090 and 5080 to be announced at CES in January. Many observers think the RTX 5070 could arrive as soon as February. Now that we have 5070 Ti specs leaked before 5070 specs, that could imply the Ti board is launched before the vanilla 5070.

This is all pretty speculative for now, but the overarching point is probably that it's all to play for. The RTX 5070 Ti could turn out to be a pretty nifty GPU as an attractive price. Or a very marginal upgrade for too much cash. Place your bets and watch this space.