NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

Written by John Yan on 4/12/2023 for PC  

NVIDIA’s releasing another in the line of Ada Lovelace cards today and this time around, they do have a Founder’s Edition to offer to the gaming community. Unlike the RTX 4070 Ti, the GeForce RTX 4070 will be offered as a NVIDIA first party product and will come in at a price of $599. Let’s see what specs we have on the table for this one.

	GeForce RTX 4070	GeForce RTX 4070 Ti	GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
SM	46	60	48
CUDA Cores	5888	7680	6144
Tensor Cores	184 (4th gen)	240 (4th gen)	192 (3rd gen)
RT Cores	46 (3rd gen)	60 (3rd gen)	48 (2nd gen)
Texture Units	184	240	192
ROPs	64	80	96
Base Clock	1920 MHz	2310 MHz	1575 MHz
Boost Clock	2475 MHz	2610 MHz	1770 MHz
Memory Clock	10500 MHz	10500 MHz	9500 MHz

This is the fifth Ada Lovelace card to be released, so most of us are pretty familiar with the architecture and the capabilities of the card. The RTX 4070 is aimed at 1440P gamers. The CUDA Core count comes in at 5888 and has a base clock speed of 1920 MHz with a boost of up to 2475 MHz. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti, we’re talking roughly 23% less CUDA Cores, 17% lower base clock speeds, and about 5% less on the max boost.

The RTX 4070 does have the same amount of VRAM at 12GB of G6X RAM as the RTX 4070 Ti and the same speed and bandwidth. There’s been a lot of talk lately on the amount of VRAM that NVIDIA includes in these cards and how we’re starting to see the effects of not including what some consider a more adequate amount. Games like Hogwart’s Legacy and The Last of Us Part I have really done a number on VRAM requirements even when playing at lower than 4K. At 12GB, I think it’s teetering on the amount needed for not only today’s games but those in the near future. Especially with the PlayStation 5 having access to 16GB of VRAM, here’s hoping NVIDIA in the future decides to put some more into these cards. For now though, 12GB in the RTX 4070 should do okay, but we’ll see how future games play out with this compared to the competition’s video cards that, while may not offer as much raw performance if all things were equal, does offer more VRAM.

The GeForce RTX 4070 is quite small compared to what’s been released previously in this generation. In fact, dare I say, it’s a normal sized card? It is about the same size as the RTX 3070, maybe slightly longer, making it the smallest Ada Lovelace card yet. Thank goodness as it’s nice to see a return to a dual slot card.

Imagine taking the cooler for the RTX 4090 and shrinking it down to the dual slot solution and that’s what the RTX 4070 looks like. The fan configuration is the same as the RTX 4090, which features fans on the opposite side of the card on either end. If you recall, the RTX 3070 had fans on the same side of the cooler for the Founder’s Edition. Here, the RTX 4070 looks similar to the current crop of founder’s cards in a dual slot design. Having gone through so many large Ada Lovelace cards, I was pleasantly surprised at the size and weight of the RTX 4070. I know, it’s funny to say that about a dual slot card having been in the PC gaming business for so long, but it’s nice to see something not take up my entire case length for once.

The I/O is the same as with the other Founder’s cards with four DisplayPorts and one HDMI 2.1 connector for a total of four connections. That is pretty standard for the past generation. And for those asking NVIDIA for DisplayPort 2.1, I think we’re going to have to wait until the next generation of video cards.

The card’s TGP is 200W and we do have that familiar single 10-pin power connector on the RTX 4070. What surprised me a little was that the dongle for the RTX 4070 was a dual 8-pin connector. Considering the RTX 3070’s TGP was 220W and even the RTX 3070 Ti had a 290W TGP, both of those included a single 8-pin adapter for its cards. I asked NVIDIA why they included a dongle with 2 8-pin connectors and they responded by saying they wanted to give the consumers more headroom in power should they decide to overclock the card. They also stated that there could be other board manufacturers that will adhere to the 200W TGP and just have a single 8-pin connector on board so if you are wanting one of those, be on the lookout for that. For the Founder’s edition though, you’ll need two 8-pin power connectors.

By now you should know all about the capabilities of the Ada Lovelace architecture such as DLSS 3 frame generation being NVIDIA’s big feature for this architecture, as well as other nice things like AV1 hardware encoding and decoding as well as being very power efficient. Seeing as this is our fourth Ada Lovelace card review, I won’t go through all of them in detail again, but suffice to say things like DLSS 3 have really improved since its initial release and continues to improve in providing a higher FPS experience in certain situations that improve upon the game over running in straight DLSS 2 mode. We’ll take a look at how the card performs with it in various titles, but for 1440p gaming, it should help out immensely on some titles without showing any or little visual anomalies. Another good feature is NVIDIA Reflex, which helps reduce latency and Valve recently announced that Counter-Strike 2 will feature this making it available on one of the most anticipated competitive shooters out there.

My testing system consisted of:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
32GB DDR4 3600 Team T-Force XTREEM RAM
MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi
Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2
Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 2TB M.2 NVMe
LG C2 OLED 4K TV
531.42 NVIDIA drivers

For this card, we’re going to drop down the resolution of each game a little and run them at 2160x1440. It’s not really made to game at 4K as I mentioned earlier, although there are some games that you’ll be able to use this card to play at 4K in. NVIDIA is aiming to match or exceed a RTX 3070 Ti, which is priced the same, but with added features that the Ada Lovelace architecture offers at a lower power draw.

First we’ll go through some games at pure rasterization. Something new this time is I’m including both the average and below that, the 1% lows.

In pure rasterization, the RTX 4070 has a nice little uplift over the RTX 3070 Ti, which was released at the same price. As long as the game isn't CPU bound like Microsoft Fight Simulator, it's about 9% to 24% better depending on the game. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti at 1440P, the RTX 4070 is about 14% to 25% slower. The RTX 4070 Ti is 33% more expensive than the the RTX 4070, but it looks like you're getting more bang for your buck here with the GeForce RTX 4070.

Let's take a look at some RTX and DLSS 2 scores.

Moving over to some ray tracing and some DLSS 2, the RTX 4070 performs roughly in the same percentages as it does in regular rasterization. Whereas Cyberpunk 2077 is rough going at 1440P with RTX enabled, the RTX 4070 does OK without DLSS 2 and becomes very good performing when using the Quality or Balanced setting. Marvel's Spider-Man considers to be CPU bound when comparing it to the RTX 4070 Ti. I didn't run as many tests in DLSS 2 this time around, but let's see how the card does with Frame Generation, one of the highlights of the Ada Lovelace architecture.

You can see the massive gains to be had when turning on DLSS 3 with Frame Generation. It takes a game like Cyberpunk 2077 and really pushes a smoothed-out performance. Going from sub-40FPS to over 100FPS with it on is just crazy. Microsoft Flight Simulator sees almost double the performance and for a game like Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is more slower paced and very heavy CPU found, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation offers an incredible tangible benefit that won't hinder the game. I didn't include the Balanced testing on Microsoft Flight Simulator because it's essentially the same as Quality in terms of performance. DLSS 3 isn't going to work as well on all games, but when it does, it can really change how immersive a game can be. As NVIDIA continues to improve on DLSS 3, we should see better and better results as well as better picture quality and less obvious artifacting and in turn, producing a better gaming experience especially with ray tracing turned on.

For those like me who love VR, I ran the card through OpenVR Benchmarking. Here's how it stacks up to a variety of video cards.

While certainly not the powerhouses like the RTX 4080 or RTX 4090, the RTX 4070 does perform better than the RTX 3070 Ti, which I used a lot in my other machine. It'll run most VR games at a good to acceptable framerates and I have no complaints using it. Obviously, it won't overtake the previous gen RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 Ti, but maybe we'll see DLSS3 come to VR one day and if so, the RTX 4070 will be ready to go to take advantage of that technology.

Finally, I ran 3D Mark at 2560x1440 and here are the scores for the graphics portion of the test.

The RTX 4070, in this test sees a 22% uplift over the RTX 3070 Ti while being 27% slower than the RTX 4070 Ti. This seems on par with roughly what I was expecting in the synthetic test and matched by some of the games tested. The RTX 4070 is also pretty damn power efficient producing these types of speeds at under 200W usage. It sometimes even goes into the 150W range such as in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2 and still out performing more power hungry cards. To say the RTX 4070 is very power efficient would be an understatement. It delivers great speeds at 1440P and uses less power to do so compared to past cards in the same performance range.

I think NVIDIA's release of the GeForce RTX 4070 is more in line of what I think a card's cost and performance should be when compared to last gen. It's not a substantial increase over what we consider the same class of card, but it does hold a much better value compared to the RTX 4070 Ti's release. Also, having a more normal sized card really helps in the fact you don't have to get a large case and for those wanting an Ada Lovelace card in some small form factor cases, this one is more suitable for that type of build.

Overall, I think this is probably the second-best card in this generation in terms of price and performance. Given the landscape of video card prices, it's one that seems to make the most sense. A solid NVIDIA Ada Lovelace card, the GeForce RTX 4070's only short coming might be the amount of VRAM for future games, but delivers on 1440P performance for the ones we have today.