Question Is the 4070 right for me?

[5900x]

I do realize I'm the final judge of this decision but could use some inputs to think if I am thinking right.

My situations and conditions:

1. Living with a GTX 970 for 8 years. I don't upgrade every gen.
2. Have never experienced Raytracing in my life. But I would like to. Same with 1440p. I want 1440p to be my regular now.
3. Not upgrading for another 6 years at the minimum whatever I buy now.
4. My average country temperature is 30-35c throughout the year including ambience.
5. Have intermittent powercuts at times and I run my whole house on a pure sine-wave inverter with a big battery, it provides 5-6hrs backup if I'm gaming on the 970.
6. Stopped running ultra settings since like 5+ years ago, most modern games are low/mediums for 60fps.
7. I love to stream games to Twitch on a single PC with dual 1440p 165hz monitors and AV1 is a priority for the future (see 3). OBS is a must, I will never use any other streaming software.
8. Not paying more than 650$ for any GPU any gen.
9. Driver stability is paramount, I haven't reinstalled Windows in 8 years, except when I moved to my new PC (5900x, 1000rmx) in 2021.
10. Outside of gaming, my PC is a private entertainment center. Don't do anything professional on it except a little bit of photo/video editing when needed for the curiosity.

Given these things, and what the 4070 offers, in terms of tech, efficiency, usability and stability, is this finally the card that I could buy? Thanks.

 

[Ar558]

I do realize I'm the final judge of this decision but could use some inputs to think if I am thinking right.

My situations and conditions:

1. Living with a GTX 970 for 8 years. I don't upgrade every gen.
2. Have never experienced Raytracing in my life. But I would like to. Same with 1440p. I want 1440p to be my regular now.
3. Not upgrading for another 6 years at the minimum whatever I buy now.
4. My average country temperature is 30-35c throughout the year including ambience.
5. Have intermittent powercuts at times and I run my whole house on a pure sine-wave inverter with a big battery, it provides 5-6hrs backup if I'm gaming on the 970.
6. Stopped running ultra settings since like 5+ years ago, most modern games are low/mediums for 60fps.
7. I love to stream games to Twitch on a single PC with dual 1440p 165hz monitors and AV1 is a priority for the future (see 3). OBS is a must, I will never use any other streaming software.
8. Not paying more than 650$ for any GPU any gen.
9. Driver stability is paramount, I haven't reinstalled Windows in 8 years, except when I moved to my new PC (5900x, 1000rmx) in 2021.
10. Outside of gaming, my PC is a private entertainment center. Don't do anything professional on it except a little bit of photo/video editing when needed for the curiosity.

Given these things, and what the 4070 offers, in terms of tech, efficiency, usability and stability, is this finally the card that I could buy? Thanks.

Well if you can get a founders at $599 or a decent partner card at less than $650 it would seem reasonable to me. It should tick your points in 2 and 7 as well.
Obviously if you are keeping a card till circa 2029, I can't guarantee that 1440p will be playable on all games but given your flexibility to run med/low you have a reasonable chance of it.
I dunno if you mean $650 or $650 inflation adjusted because realistically you wont get a 7070(?) in 2029 for that price so if you are hard on that you will like be capped at 60 class next time.
Nvidia's driver's have always been the most stable and Linus even mentioned it's robustness during testing in the LTT Review.

 

[Avro Arrow]

No, the RTX 4070 is not the card for you because there's no way that you're going to be able to make a card with only 12GB last that long, especially at 1440p.

The best card for you would be the RX 7900 XT because while it's $200 more, it has 20GB of VRAM instead of 12GB and that means it will last many years longer than the RTX 4070. It also has an AV1 hardware encoder so you won't even be missing out on that.

I would caution you though, because ray-tracing is extremely unimpressive right now. It's really not worth having as a criterion for buying a card because you'll just end up paying more for nothing. The vast majority of gamers don't bother with it (no matter what card they have) because 99% of the time you can't tell the difference and the 1% of the time that you can, you won't care. It's just a gimmick to sell more nVidia cards but the performance hit you take (no matter what card you have) just isn't worth it.

The RX 7900 XT is 8% faster than the RTX 4070 with ray-tracing turned on:

The RTX 7900 XT is 31% faster than the RTX 4070 with ray-tracing turned off:

So, these are the boxes that the RX 7900 XT checks:
1 - Brutally faster than the RTX 4070
2 - Faster than the RTX 4070 with RT on
3 - Has an AV1 hardware encoder like the RTX 4070
4 - Has 66% more VRAM than the RTX 4070

The ambient temperature is irrelevant and while the RTX 4070 does draw less power, what good is a card's power consumption if it doesn't have enough VRAM to keep gaming in the long-term?

I believe that, because of its 20GB of VRAM, the RX 7900 XT will be a VERY long-lived card, but the RTX 4070 won't be. In fact, I fully expect the RTX 4070 to get out-lived by the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, RX 6900 XT and RX 6950 XT, all cards from the last-generation because they all have 16GB of VRAM while the RTX 4070 has only 12GB.