Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Review: Get more frames for less

History always repeats itself. As early as 2018, Nvidia released the first wave of RTX graphics cards, claiming to have RT and machine learning capabilities, but the price has also risen to an eye-popping level. RTX 2070 costs £530, anyone know? However, the Force returned to balance with 2019’s “Ultra” update, in which tier 60, 70, and 80 GPUs were beefed up in terms of specs and starting to drop in price. The same goes for the controversial RTX 40 series of graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. Compared to the RTX 3080 10GB, the price vs. performance comparison is unflattering, and this time it’s the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, and 4080 that get the super treatment.

Nvidia seems to be releasing a new GPU every week, starting with the RTX 4070 Super. Priced at $599 (US) / £579 (UK) – the same price as the RTX 4070 – it’s essentially the same card as its predecessor, but with two notable improvements. First, the number of CUDA cores has increased significantly: 7168 cores compared to 5888 cores, an increase of nearly 22%. To further improve performance, TGP has been increased by 10%, allowing more energy to be obtained from the AD104 processor’s more comprehensive performance. Due to the AD104, a wider memory interface is not possible, which means we are still using a 192-bit bus with a bandwidth of 504GB/s – which also limits the 4070 Super to the same 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

We should expect a significant performance boost to the standard RTX 4070, perhaps knocking on the door of RTX 4070 Ti performance without increasing the price. Meanwhile, the regular 4070 is $50 off, and Nvidia is strongly hinting that third-party partners could offer further price cuts to more meaningfully compete with AMD’s impressive RX 7800 XT. We’ll talk about the other super cards in due course, but the specs don’t lie: the whole point of the RTX 4080 Super is to bring the price down to $999/£959 with only minimal spec bumps. The RTX 4070 Ti Super is interesting, though: users can upgrade to the AD103 chip, and a wider memory bus opens the door to 16GB of memory – something its $799/£769 price level desperately needs.

Today we are reviewing the Founders Edition of the RTX 4070 Super. Made by Nvidia themselves, I consider the stock 4070 FE to be the ultimate version of this card – nicely built, but not overly engineered like the partner cards. The 4070 Super FE is equally enjoyable for the same reasons, but this time Nvidia adds a little more spice with a Spinal Tap-style “No More Black” color swap.

It’ll attract fingerprints, but it’s a really good-looking product – and remember you’re getting about the performance of an RTX 3090 in a conventionally sized GPU with excellent power efficiency, which is as much a winner as the RTX 4070 when we first saw it.

Other than that, there’s nothing new. The overall form factor is the same, as is the port array: HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. Power is provided via the controversial 12VHPWR PSU socket, and there are dual eight-pin PCIe power cord adapters in the box. The box in question is also standard Nvidia f are for 70-series and above graphics cards – that is, it’s absolutely massive considering the relatively modest size of the contents inside.

Next up is a power analysis using the Nvidia PCAT interposer hardware located between the graphics card and its power supply (PCIe slot and auxiliary input). We measure average power consumption and frame rate. Divide the former by the latter and you get the number of joules per frame – the lower the better.

There’s not much to tell about this particular story – it’s the same situation as when we reviewed the Radeon RX 7800 XT. The Ada Lovelace architecture continues to deliver best-in-class power efficiency, which means even the slim Founders Edition cards, including the 4070 Super, are cool to the touch and very quiet.

Nvidia is significantly more efficient than AMD when testing ray tracing games, but even in rasterization it still has a significant advantage, as shown in the Forza Horizon 5 results. Hitman 3 highlights that when a specific game has a vendor advantage (AMD in this case), the red team’s efficiency increases significantly, making it more consistent with Ada’s results.

With the preliminaries out of the way, it’s time to get into the real benchmarking. As always, we used high-end gear, pairing a Core i9 13900K with 6000MT/s G.Skill DDR5 and an Asus ROG Maximus Hero Z690 motherboard to minimize CPU bottlenecks and thus show the GPU differences more clearly.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Analysis

• introduce [This Page]
• RT Benchmark: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control
• RT Benchmark: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, F1 22
• RT/DLSS/FSR2/DLSS3 Benchmark: “Cyberpunk 2077”, “Dying Light 2”, “Forza Horizon 5”
• Game Benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5
• Game benchmarks: “Hitman 3”, “A Plague Tale: Requiem”, “Return”
• Conclusion and recommendations

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