Alleged NVIDIA AD106 GeForce RTX 40 GPU Benchmarks Show RTX 3070 Ti Class Performance
For sure, the GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti are cool graphics cards, but the value proposition as well as the way the specifications are trending have left some folks wondering what lower-end Ada Lovelace-based GeForce GPUs will look like. Well, we may have our first peek at an upcoming desktop GeForce part with some leaked specifications and benchmarks out of Chinese-language forum ChipHell.
Still, assuming these results are legitimate, this gives us a decent picture of what kind of performance we can expect out of x60-class Ada Lovelace GeForce cards. As expected, the AD106 GPU runs an extremely high GPU boost clock, and this gives it great compute and raster performance despite being smaller than the GA104 by a fair bit. However, it is suffering under a rather extreme memory bandwidth deficit compared to the older cards.
You can see this demonstrated in the 3DMark results, where the AD106 chip generally comes out ahead of both TU104 and GA104 in the standard tests at 1080p and 1440p, but in Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy Extreme—which run in native 4K resolution—it falls behind the older GPUs. It also loses out to the GA104 GPU rather badly in the new Speed Way test that makes heavy use of asset streaming. That's likely because of its PCIe 4.0 x8 interface, which you can see demonstrated in the PCIe test at the bottom.
3DMark data graphed for easier comparison by @harukaze5719.
Of course, it's not exactly fair to compare the AD106 against the previous-generation TU104 and GA104 parts given that they are clearly a higher tier of product, but panzerlied admits that himself. Also, as posters in the forum point out, it's possible that this GPU could be priced as high as current street prices of RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 cards based on GA104 silicon. If you're intending to play in high resolutions like 4K, the older cards could end up being the better buy for you.
There's also the consideration that the AD106 part comes out well ahead in the DXR ray-tracing feature test, though, and that's to say nothing of the new card's support for DLSS 3 frame generation. Furthermore, panzerlied says that the performance of this AD106 GPU is probably not final, and the market may not look the same in a few months when these cards launch, either.
