Nvidia RTX 4070 Graphics Card Review
Peter Donnell / 2 years ago
See that image above? That’s an RTX 4090 an RTX 4080, and… well, this is adorable, an RTX 4070.
Not everyone has huge amounts of money in this day and age to spend on a PC, let alone a graphics card, but, even though it may not seem like it, GPUs are developing and offering more performance than ever before, and with the launch of the RTX 4070 today, at $599, could this be the most popular RTX 40 series that NVIDIA release? I don’t want to stomp over old ground when it comes to other cards in the 40 series stack that maybe don’t offer too much value for money, because I want to give the RTX 4070 a fair shake, especially considering the large uptake it has over its predecessors, the RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti.
Not only do we now get 50% more GDDR6X memory, but we now see a huge uptake in L2 cache, up from 4MB to a whopping 32MB to keep it aligned with the rest of the ADA Lovelace family, which along with the AD104 based GPU means we now get the latest generation of both RT cores and Tensor cores, along with NVIDIA’s latest DLSS 3 upscaling technology, as you’d expect.
What is interesting, however, is how NVIDIA has managed to harness the power that is said to offer the same performance as an RTX 3080, all while using less than 200 Watts. A stark decrease from the 320 Watts that the 30 series card maxed out at. Couple this with the latest DLSS3 technology with frame generation which NVIDIA is claiming can give 1.4x more performance than a 3080. On paper, it seems NVIDIA really could be on to a winner. More performance, all while using significantly less power and coming in $100 cheaper at launch too. Also, factor in that a lot of gamers skipped a generation, and are still clinging onto their trusty RTX 2080s, which again, NVIDIA claim some pretty big uplifts, with 1.6x more performance in favour of the RTX 4070, and 2.2x more performance, again, while utilising DLSS3 with frame generation.
Now anyone who knows me or has seen my content before will know that I generally take brands’ own findings with a pinch of salt. I mean, it’s what keeps us in business, doing unbiased benchmark content, to see if the brands can be held to account and actually offer up something that is worth buying, because I’m all about value for money, and that’s what’s slightly interesting about this launch. Today sees the launch of the oh-so-cute Founders edition, along with MSRP-based cards, while tomorrow is for the more expensive custom AIB cards that don’t hit MSRP, so definitely keep an eye out for that.
Video
If you want to see our full video going through this, you can do so below.