Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review: The $599 RTX 3080 challenger

The arrival of the $599/£589 GeForce RTX 4070 continues the trend of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs: performance is still strong, thanks to the efficient Ada Lovelace architecture at its core, but in terms of “frames per currency unit”, This is a step further than the true generational leap provided by the 3070 and 3080. After all, the goal of the RTX 4070 is only to match the performance of the 3080, and the 3070 has a higher goal: to match the previous generation flagship card RTX 2080 Ti.

We can’t hide the fact that the RTX 4070 is significantly more expensive than its predecessor, so we’re focusing on the RTX 3080’s performance. Price comparisons here are actually pretty challenging, as the 3080 is hard to find for its advertised MSRP of $699/£649 – and it’s been around for the life of the product. Surprisingly, even in 2023, $750/£700 retail is more common. So, assuming the RTX 4070 hits its $599/£589 target (which Nvidia is bullish on), you’re at least paying a lot less for this level of performance.

You also get something more feature-rich: there’s an extra 2GB of video memory, plus you get dramatically improved power efficiency and DLSS 3 frame generation. That said, it’s hard to avoid the fact that the RTX 40-series is somewhat reminiscent of the 20-series launch, focusing more on features that still need widespread adoption, while overall performance remains relatively solid. What’s different this time around, however, is that frame generation is supported to a much higher degree earlier – with the arrival of Cyberpunk 2077’s path-traced lighting upgrade, Series 40 opens the door to experiences that wouldn’t work on older cards. It’s fine.

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As you can see from the impromptu benchmarks above, the RTX 4070 is likely to be the cheapest and lowest performing Ada Lovelace series to date, but the combination of new architecture, AI upscaling and DLSS 3 frame generation means you can enjoy The most advanced path tracing experience — at least in my tests — plays at over 60fps.

In the embedded video review below you’ll see my two tests against the RTX 3080 and the RX 6800 XT but as the benchmarks show the 4070 delivers a level of performance that consistently looks smooth on a 1440p screen, Note that VRR/G-Sync/FreeSync is required for this game and basically all games that support frame generation. Visual quality? The inset above shows what DLSS Balanced mode looks like at 1440p, which includes the RT Overdrive feature.

It’s great, exciting stuff – but definitely more of a preview of the future. Going back to the review of the 4070 itself, it’s nice to see that as a physical project we can breathe a sigh of relief after the huge, oversized third-party 4070 Ti offerings. The Founders form factor is very reminiscent of the RTX 3070 – relatively small, easy to fit into a variety of situations, and efficient too. The TGP we’re seeing here is only 200W, while the RTX 3080 could hit 320W. It’s nice to have a product that doesn’t go crazy with overcooling or crazy lighting — though it remains to be seen if most third-party cards will take a similar approach.

As far as specs go, I wish Nvidia got more criticism for being “cheap” when it comes to silicon. There isn’t any increase in CUDA cores compared to the RTX 3070, and the 4070 even runs on a more constrained memory bus (192-bit vs. 256-bit). That means everything we’re seeing on the gen-on-gen side comes from architectural improvements, faster clock speeds, and the inherent advantages of the 4nm process node.

At the same time, there are significant cuts compared to the 4070 Ti based on the same chip – 23% fewer shaders, 5% less clock speed, and 9.5% less memory bandwidth. With all of this in mind, Nvidia’s goal of delivering 3080-class performance in both RT and rasterization is likely to be challenging – because the RTX 4070 Ti’s own advantages over the 3080 are so varied. It can do anything like a 3080 Ti, all the way up to surpassing the performance of an RTX 3090 Ti.

We’ll start our analysis by looking at power consumption and efficiency – we should see the RTX 3080 making some serious progress here, keeping in mind its 60% higher TGP target. We’re using slightly tweaked versions of existing benchmarks–in Dying Light 2, we ditched the custom run in favor of a brand new benchmark sequence that Techland added to the game.

We calculated efficiency by recording the average power consumption (in watts) over the duration of the benchmark and dividing it by the average frame rate recorded during the same sequence. This gives us a power consumption per frame metric in joules. The lower the number, the less power is consumed per frame. So, on paper, the RTX 4070 is about the same efficiency as the RTX 4070 Ti, with some small improvements that are more noticeable in tests with ray tracing active.

For example, in our Control benchmark, the RTX 4070 consumed 72% of the power of the RTX 3080 running the same sequence, which improved to 68% in the Dying Light 2 benchmark. Forza Horizon 5 seems to run extremely efficiently on the Ada Lovelace architecture, here it uses only 55% of the 3080’s power level per frame – impressive stuff. Meanwhile, in Hitman 3 without RT, we’re back to the RTX 4070, using about two-thirds the same power per frame.

So far, Ada, so it’s time for a more intensive benchmark. We’ve completely discarded all existing data and actually moved to an improved testbed, keeping in mind the RTX 4070 is primarily aimed at 1440p gamers and we want to do our best to alleviate CPU constraints as much as possible. So the Core i9 12900K gave up on the 13900K (cooled by a Noctua NH-D15), but we’re still using the same Asus Maximus Hero Z690 motherboard, the same 6000MT/s Gskill DDR5 and the same Samsung 970 Pro NVMe storage.

We also reorganized the test suite by removing Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. A Plague Tale: Requiem and Return are titles designed for current generation systems that were added to the mix, while we replaced Marvel’s Spider-Man Remake with the more challenging (at least RT-wise) Marvel’s Spider-Man : Miles Morales. We’ve moved rebuild testing to only focus on DLSS/FSR2 quality modes – but we’ve added DLSS 3 frame generation to the mix. With AMD announcing FSR3, it’s clear that frame generation isn’t a one-off feature, it’s becoming an established choice.

Finally, while previous-gen comparisons can be a good idea of ​​how a new card will perform against its predecessors, we also targeted previous Nvidia 70-series cards dating back to the GTX 1070 – we wanted to show how a more realistic upgrade path is more likely to look . I’d say this is actually more important than a generation-to-generation comparison, since RTX 3070 owners are much less likely to be looking to upgrade.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware and Power Analysis [This Page]
• RT Benchmarks: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, F1 22
• RT Benchmarks: Hitman 3, Metro Exodus Plus, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• RT/DLSS/FSR2/DLSS3 benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• Gaming Benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5
• Gaming Benchmarks: Hitman 3, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Homecoming
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070: Digital Foundry Verdict

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