NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Review

Ray Tracing & DLSS

So pure rasterisation I guess could be looked at in two ways. The first being that the 4070 Ti at 1440p, which is where this card is aimed at, does better than a card that was over double the price at its launch, though I made that clear at the time that it was severely overpriced in the first place. The other area is that this is a custom AIB card so does demand a premium over a reference 4070 Ti, which puts it around the same price as the 7900 XT which beats it at both 1440p and 4K. This is partly the fault of NVIDIA, but also the fact that the new 7000 series cards are so good in pure rasterisation.

Now an area where NVIDIA has always typically done better is in Ray Tracing, even though AMD has stepped up their game in that area too, so let’s take a look at how the 4070 Ti does there.

So starting things off with A plague Tale: Requiem where the game has upscaling, but no Ray Tracing and the 4070 Ti comes in with around 45% better performance than the 3070 Ti when comparing no DLSS, and then the same when DLSS is set to performance mode. Being a 40 series though, the 4070 Ti is then able to harness the power of frame generation in DLSS 3 which boosts the performance by another 34% at 109 frames per second.

In Control, we see strong gains over the predecessor 3070 Ti, and with Ray Tracing enabled, you see a drop in performance as expected, though does mean it sits just above the 7900 XT in Ray Tracing performance, which is great given the price point, but does show that AMD have improved quite dramatically. Enabling DLSS then pushes the performance back up by a whopping 100%, which I think anyone who has played Portal will agree that DLSS is very much needed on max settings with Ray Tracing.

In Cyberpunk at 4K with Ray Tracing on, we saw some dips, though this still saw a nice increase from the last generation, and pushes both the average and 1% lows higher than the 7900 XT. With upscaling enabled, we managed to unlock another 181% performance compared to just having Ray Tracing enabled, which keeps it ahead of the 7900 XT, while DLSS3 gives us another 45% of extra performance, putting us above levels of performance that the RTX 4080 saw with DLSS without frame generation.

Destroy All Humans 2, again, saw nice increases in performance generation to generation, while the 7900 XT beat it in all-out rasterisation. Luckily, as the game does have DLSS and not FSR, NVIDIA has the opportunity to fight back, seeing a 74% increase in performance with DLSS on, which is only just behind the performance of the RTX 4080. Enabling DLSS 3 which includes frame generation sees a small bump, but nothing noticeable like we saw on other Ada Lovelace based GPUs.

Spider-Man includes Ray Tracing and DLSS along with frame generation, and here we see results that are much closer between the 4070 Ti and 7900 XT, even with frame generation turned on. The 7900 XT and 4070 Ti managed to match each other in typical upscale performance, or DLSS vs FSR, while DLSS 3 just gave that little extra allowing them to win in this title.

Microsoft Flight Sim still has its demons in terms of CPU bottleneck, and while DLSS did boost the performance by over 45%, the clear winner here is when DLSS 3 is enabled which sees the performance increase by over 88%, with 1% lows also powering ahead. So much so that the RTX 4080 could still make do with a faster CPU as it scores worse here.

Lastly in Watch Dogs:Legion, again we see a plentiful uplift from the 3070 Ti, though the 7900 XT still manages to come out on top by 18%. When Ray Tracing is enabled, things start to perform neck and neck, while DLSS manages to claw back some performance, giving us a balance of Ray Tracing and solid performance.