> until I saw I needed to get a 4090 for any sort of meaningful VRAM increase. That's like comparing a 7 year old laptop with 8GB of DDR3 to a new laptop with

> until I saw I needed to get a 4090 for any sort of meaningful VRAM increase. That's like comparing a 7 year old laptop with 8GB of DDR3 to a new laptop with 8GB of DDR4 and judging them equal merely on the fact that they both have 8GB of RAM -- with no regard for CPU et cetera. Newer memory achieves higher bandwidth, regardless of total capacity, and there are numerous generational improvements that play a huge part across the board. The cheapest 40 series card currently available, the RTX4060 (MSRP $299), provides 2.34x the FP32 GFLOPS of the 1070, for instance. Moreover, it provides more than double the effective memory speed, and all at a net reduction of -35W TDP compared to the 1070. I would say that the 4060 alone is quite a sizeable upgrade. Even a last gen 3060 would be an upgrade over the 1070. The 4090 absolutely blows the 1070 out of the water. There is no comparison.