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NVIDIA RTX 4070 overview: The brand new 1440p gaming chief

Written by Jeff Lampkin

Slowly, however absolutely, NVIDIA is making its 40-series GPUs extra inexpensive. Now it is right down to $599 with the brand new RTX 4070, a mid-range card targeted on 1440p gaming. Whereas it is $100 greater than its predecessor’s launch worth, the fabulous RTX 3070, that card usually offered for greater than $1,000 as a result of provide chain crunch, scalpers and insatiable crypto bros. Primarily based on what we have seen from the 4070 Ti, NVIDIA’s new playing cards are literally staying near their retail worth, which is nice information for anybody itching for an improve.

Gallery: NVIDIA RTX 4070 | 5 Photographs

Judging from Valve’s Steam hardware statistics, I might wager many avid gamers are ready on the eventual RTX 4060 earlier than giving up their outdated playing cards, particularly if it finally ends up promoting nearer to $400. However based mostly on my testing, the 4070 remains to be a stable selection for sensible avid gamers who could wan to splurge a bit. It is quick sufficient to ship wonderful 1440p efficiency with ray tracing enabled, and it could possibly even ship stable 4K gaming in a pinch too. Although it is noticeably slower than the $799 RTX 4070 Ti in most benchmarks, that will not matter a lot whenever you’re truly within the warmth of battle. (Simply consider all you can do with that further $200!)

Professionals

  • Wonderful 1440p gaming efficiency
  • DLSS 3 allows higher ray tracing efficiency than earlier than
  • AV1 encoding will probably be helpful to streamers
  • Quiet and funky

Cons

  • Nonetheless expensive at $599
  • Not each recreation helps DLSS 3

The RTX 4070 options NVIDIA’s new Ada Lovelace structure, sporting 5,888 CUDA cores, a base clock pace of 1,920 MHz (increase to 2,475 MHz) and 16GB of GDDR6X RAM. The 3070, in the meantime, had the identical quantity of CUDA cores, however it was based mostly on NVIDIA’s older Ampere structure. It may solely attain as much as 1,725 MHz and had 8GB of slower GDDR6 reminiscence. Regardless of these variations, the 3070 nonetheless holds up effectively, so I would not rush out to exchange it anytime quickly. However in the event you’re nonetheless holding onto an RTX 20-series GPU or one thing older, the 4070 could be the GPU you have been ready for.

NVIDIA RTX 4070 port view

Photograph by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

We acquired the RTX 4070 Founder’s Version card from NVIDIA, which mainly appears to be like like a shrunken down model of the 4080 and 4090. It looks like a premium card, with a modern steel case, a bevy of heatsink fins and two giant followers to take care of warmth. It is also a two-slot GPU, just like the 4070 Ti, permitting it to suit inside smaller instances much better than the big 4080 and 4090. Port-wise, there are three DisplayPort connections and a single HDMI. As with all of NVIDIA’s latest playing cards, it additionally consists of an adapter to attach two 8-pin PCIe energy cables (a single PCIe Gen 5 cable can even work).

3DMark TimeSpy Excessive

Port Royal (Ray Tracing)

Cyberpunk

Blender

NVIDIA RTX 4070

8,610

11,195/52 fps

1440p RT DLSS: 120 fps

6,020

NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti

10,624

14,163/66 fps

1440p RT DLSS : 135 fps

7,247

NVIDIA RTX 3070

6,226

8,032/37 fps

N/A

3,500

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

11,688

13,247/61 fps

1440p FSRT RT: 114 fps

3,516

As soon as I began benching and taking part in video games with the RTX 4070, it carried out simply as I anticipated: Someplace between the RTX 3080 (which launched at $699) and the 3080 Ti ($1,119). The distinction, although, is that it helps NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 expertise, which can assist pace up ray tracing efficiency by inserting AI-generated frames. I used to be significantly impressed by how effectively it dealt with Cyberpunk 2077: in 1440p with maxed out graphics and “extremely” ray tracing settings, it delivered a clean 120 fps. The RTX 3070, compared, struggled to carry 75 fps with the identical settings utilizing the older DLSS 2, which does not use body era.

Management, an older title that solely helps DLSS 2, had a much less dramatic efficiency bump with the 4070. Whereas taking part in in 1440p with maxed graphics and all of its ray tracing settings flipped on, it reached 106 fps, in comparison with 90 fps with the 3070. Nonetheless, it is a bit of a shock to see a mid-range card scoring triple digit body charges with all the recreation’s ray tracing options enabled (which incorporates reflections, shadows and particles). Not too way back, Management used to humble the mightiest video playing cards.

About the author

Jeff Lampkin

Jeff Lampkin was the first writer to have joined gamepolar.com. He has since then inculcated very effective writing and reviewing culture at GamePolar which rivals have found impossible to imitate. His approach has been to work on the basics while the whole world was focusing on the superstructures.