Nvidia RTX 4070 Graphics Card Review

Ray Tracing & DLSS

Luckily, we should see that spark of evolution and an uplift when it comes to Ray Tracing and DLSS performance, starting with A Plague Tale: Requiem which saw the RTX 3080 commanding an 11% lead over the RTX 4070 in rasterisation performance, and enabling DLSS in performance mode, did see these figures jump up, though the 3080 still had a healthy 9% lead over the Ada Lovelace based GPU. Thankfully DLSS3 now pushed another 35% more performance out of the RTX 4070, now propelling it 24% ahead of the Turing-based RTX 3080.

In Control, the RTX 4070 was already matching the performance of the 6800 XT, while with Ray Tracing enabled, the RTX 4070 did come in 19% faster at 31 FPS average, while enabling DLSS saw another 96% more performance, leaving it now 12% behind the RTX 3080.

Cyberpunk is where we can really appreciate the true potential of the 40 series thanks to DLSS 3 which pushes an extra 31% more performance compared to the RTX 3080, and 108% more compared to the 6800 XT, of which both cards don’t have DLSS3 with Frame Generation based technology, which is where I feel the RTX 4070 can really make up for its shortfalls.

Spider-Man is very much the same story, with the RTX 3080 beating the rasterisation performance of the RTX 4070, while with Ray Tracing enabled, we see identical performance, and then some pretty typical gains on both cards, that now sees the newer card coming in stronger with a lead of just under 6%. Enabling DLSS3 eeks outs another 13% more performance which matches the performance of the 4070 Ti with DLSS enabled without Frame Generation at 103 frames per second.

Microsoft Flight Sim being such a heavily CPU-bound title means that DLSS 3 is a real saving grace, and something that gives a huge lead of 57% over the RTX 3080, which even without DLSS3 was performing nigh on identically to the RTX 4070 with the previous version of DLSS enabled.

Then lastly, in Watch Dogs: Legion, we start to see some strong performance uptakes on the RTX 4070 that almost makes up for the loss in performance that we see from enabling Ray Tracing, bringing us numbers that sit just 7% behind compared with no Ray Tracing or DLSS being enabled.

So DLSS 3 clearly makes a big difference to the RTX 4070, and to me at least, it seems that NVIDIA are hedging their bets on frame generation giving them the upper hand. While some will comment that it’s fake frames and smoke and mirrors. It’s really not, and instead, is just the next step in AI computing, and the fact that games still look stunning, why wouldn’t you want the very best performance tailored to you, without spending a ton of money on a card and not enabling it? Trying to get my mind into that of NVIDIA’s and I think I’m bang on the money.