Review Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review: Boosted clocks and core counts for the same $599 as the vanilla 4070

[Admin]

The RTX 4070 Super delivers exactly what you'd expect from a mid-cycle update: more performance and better bang for the buck. It lands between the 4070 and 4070 Ti, closer to the latter but taking over the $599 price of the former.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review: Boosted clocks and core counts for the same $599 as the vanilla 4070 : Read more

 

[Gururu]

So they squeeze out a few more FPS to beat the 7800xt and charge $50 more. The price games are maddening.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Mostly what I was expecting... but wow, those results against the 7800XT at 1440p are kinda crazy. +24% for the whole suite, and about +50% in the RT-only results? AMD really needs to rethink the price of the 7800XT.

Interesting results, and interesting article (so far. I look forward to the rest. Hope you get some good sleep until then, Jarred. )
I'm curious to know how well it overclocks. Can it match the 4070 Ti?

 

[atomicWAR]

While a step in the right direction, the ram capacity is still really underwhelming but the performance is promising. The 4070 series (Ti, super or otherwise) should have come with 16GB while the 4080 series should have had 20GB...This gen, save the 4090, has been really disappointing. Cost increases (70/80 series) with underwhelming performance (60/70/80) have been fairly pervasive in the product stack. I hope this helps things...I am interested in the 4070 Ti Super as many of my nephews and nieces have been wanting to upgrade this gen and thus far it has been hard to recommend anything other than the 4090 to them which is out of their budgets by about 700 dollars give or take a hundred.

 

[Tom Sunday]

So they squeeze out a few more FPS to beat the 7800xt and charge $50 more. The price games are maddening.

12GB of 4070 SUPER bliss? That is the million dollar question? At this point in time I would expect more than 12GB of VRAM in especially 2024. Even a 1080ti already had 11GB of VRAM in its side pocket. Will it pay in holding-out for a 4070 Ti SUPER: 2.5X Faster than the RTX 3070 Ti and sporting a mouth watering 16GB of GDDR6X? With that along bolstering CUDA cores, VRAM and reaching 4K gaming heaven? Will in fact a 4070 Ti SUPER be essentially a slight cutdown of the original RTX 4080, meaning that one can expect to see similar performance from the two cards?

Overall and in my very limited view the ‘4070 Super Refresh’ series is indeed a welcomed addition. It's commendable that the Super’s overall offer much better ray tracing performance, better energy efficiency and generally a notable performance upgrade compared to the Non-Super cards. No question that NVIDIAs latest 'Super-Play' will certainly put AMD under greater pressure, because they offer more performance and efficiency for basically the same price points. On the flipside I understand that the 4070 Super Refreshes do give the impression that they are only a mid-cycle gap filler. Because of the price? Further if AMD would only lower the price of the 7800XT, many I think would still go for the XT. In some instances AMD reputably has long preferred to stake a few cards at higher prices than to gain market share through price reductions. Food for thought!

 

[pocketdrummer]

Toms Hardware needs to do a price to generation performance uplift chart. Use performance uplift as the tier and not the actual product names (xx70 and xx80 mean nothing now). I'm sure we'll see that the price has gone up and the performance uplift has not tracked.

 

[kyzarvs]

Call me a luddite as I remain on a venerable 1080ti, but I'm not sure I would trust laying down £600 for a 12GB card today and hoping it works as well as far into the future as my current card has. While it may be okay today, when it's as old as my 1080ti is now, I think 12GB will be a massive limitation.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

At this point I'd have to tell people that unless they have a pre-RTX 2000 series card to wait for the 5000 series. Yes the 4070 Super is a solid 4K60 and 1080p144 (and a case by case basis 2560x1440 120fps) card, but you're still dealing with 12GB VRAM and a very unnecessary 16 pin power adapter for $600+ in an era of horrible economics.

 

[logainofhades]

Mostly what I was expecting... but wow, those results against the 7800XT at 1440p are kinda crazy. +24% for the whole suite, and about +50% in the RT-only results? AMD really needs to rethink the price of the 7800XT.

Interesting results, and interesting article (so far. I look forward to the rest. Hope you get some good sleep until then, Jarred. )
I'm curious to know how well it overclocks. Can it match the 4070 Ti?

That 24% is only due to RT. If you look at pure raster performance, the gap is much smaller. Definitely not worth the $90 ish price premium, unless you truly care about RT, which I personally do not.

 

[subspruce]

I'm curious to know how well it overclocks. Can it match the 4070 Ti?

No, ofc not. Nvidia pushes their chips to the max that they can without having more not-up-to-requirements GPUs than can be offloaded as some kind of China Quadro.

 

[oofdragon]

Only in Toms Hardware fairy tale land the 4070 matches the 7800xt in raster, everywhere else the 4070Ti ties with it. This website is a joke

 

[CelicaGT]

Only in Toms Hardware fairy tale land the 4070 matches the 7800xt in raster, everywhere else the 4070Ti ties with it. This website is a joke

That's where GN and others have it too? 4070Ti trades blows with the 7900XT most times. I would have gone in AMD's direction this time but the 7900XT was more expensive in my country and is less performant in the specific titles I play.

 

[logainofhades]

Only in Toms Hardware fairy tale land the 4070 matches the 7800xt in raster, everywhere else the 4070Ti ties with it. This website is a joke

Then I guess Techspot is living in fairy tale land too?

Techpowerup must be as well.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

That 24% is only due to RT. If you look at pure raster performance, the gap is much smaller. Definitely not worth the $90 ish price premium, unless you truly care about RT, which I personally do not.

Yes, I know. I do care about RT, and would sooner turn down other graphics settings before turning off certain RT settings. I'm all for the combined chart.

(I'm not trying to be combative or anything. : P Just stating my taste.)

 

[Unolocogringo]

No, ofc not. Nvidia pushes their chips to the max that they can without having more not-up-to-requirements GPUs than can be offloaded as some kind of China Quadro.

Not true at all.
Almost every Nvidia card I have owned had some headroom left if properly cooled.
My cards.
4070 dual 2940-2970. stock 2520
3060ti FE 2040-2070- stock 1670
1070 dual 1940-1970 stock 1580
1070 SC 1970-2040 stock 1650
I can list many more if you like. My ti4200 was an overclocking monster. Held the Mad Onion 3dmark top spot for about 6 months.
Don't speak of thing you do not know about.😲

And no I am not a FANBOY.
Gaming is about 5% of my computer usage, 5% is here or surfing and 90% is Folding@Home which Nvidia cards excel at in PPD/watt metric. Same as my AMD CPUs.

 

[doughillman]

Only in Toms Hardware fairy tale land the 4070 matches the 7800xt in raster, everywhere else the 4070Ti ties with it. This website is a joke

You can, of course, point out a reputable site where the 4070ti ties with the 7800XT, right?

 

[doughillman]

Call me a luddite as I remain on a venerable 1080ti, but I'm not sure I would trust laying down £600 for a 12GB card today and hoping it works as well as far into the future as my current card has. While it may be okay today, when it's as old as my 1080ti is now, I think 12GB will be a massive limitation.

I wouldn't expect ANY mid-range card to be doing particularly well 7 years on. No matter what the price, that's what this is at this point. A mid-range card.

 

[Sluggotg]

Great article Jarred. I will read it again When it is complete. (all nighters are not fun). I am really interested in the next two cards. It is nice to see some new models come out. More memory would be nice but I haven't had any issues with the 12GB in any of my 3080ti cards. I think this is the correct price point all said and done with. AMD could certainly release some new updated models too. That would shake it up a bit.

 

[thestryker]

While it doesn't feel great that a $600 card just now matches my $800 card from last generation it's certainly a move in the right direction. That being said I still feel bad for anyone who is looking to upgrade this generation (or needs to buy new). AMD has had better price v perf, but also comes with FSR being worse than DLSS (whether this is notable depends on title sadly) and RT performance that is basically a joke.

Here's hoping for Battlemage to reset the low-midrange market expectations since $600 is now apparently midrange otherwise.

 

[Giroro]

12GB of 4070 SUPER bliss? That is the million dollar question? At this point in time I would expect more than 12GB of VRAM in especially 2024. Even a 1080ti already had 11GB of VRAM in its side pocket. Will it pay in holding-out for a 4070 Ti SUPER: 2.5X Faster than the RTX 3070 Ti and sporting a mouth watering 16GB of GDDR6X? With that along bolstering CUDA cores, VRAM and reaching 4K gaming heaven? Will in fact a 4070 Ti SUPER be essentially a slight cutdown of the original RTX 4080, meaning that one can expect to see similar performance from the two cards?

Overall and in my very limited view the ‘4070 Super Refresh’ series is indeed a welcomed addition. It's commendable that the Super’s overall offer much better ray tracing performance, better energy efficiency and generally a notable performance upgrade compared to the Non-Super cards. No question that NVIDIAs latest 'Super-Play' will certainly put AMD under greater pressure, because they offer more performance and efficiency for basically the same price points. On the flipside I understand that the 4070 Super Refreshes do give the impression that they are only a mid-cycle gap filler. Because of the price? Further if AMD would only lower the price of the 7800XT, many I think would still go for the XT. In some instances AMD reputably has long preferred to stake a few cards at higher prices than to gain market share through price reductions. Food for thought!

I have chat-gpt too. It's a lot of fun

 

[nitrium]

At this point I'd have to tell people that unless they have a pre-RTX 2000 series card to wait for the 5000 series. Yes the 4070 Super is a solid 4K60 and 1080p144 (and a case by case basis 2560x1440 120fps) card, but you're still dealing with 12GB VRAM and a very unnecessary 16 pin power adapter for $600+ in an era of horrible economics.

Yeah, I have an RTX 2060 6GB which is still working fine and delivers 30-60 fps on every new game at med-high settings. as long as you keep RT off. Unless it breaks for some reason and I have to replace it, I'm waiting till next year for an upgrade.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Mostly what I was expecting... but wow, those results against the 7800XT at 1440p are kinda crazy. +24% for the whole suite, and about +50% in the RT-only results? AMD really needs to rethink the price of the 7800XT.

Interesting results, and interesting article (so far. I look forward to the rest. Hope you get some good sleep until then, Jarred. )
I'm curious to know how well it overclocks. Can it match the 4070 Ti?

Honestly, I haven't even played with overclocking due to a lack of time. With a bunch of games showing pretty big swings in performance since my last full testing (A580 in October), I had to rerun a whole bunch of stuff and that took ages to update. I would expect the usual 5~10% improvement in performance with overclocking, but without voltage increases I don't think it will ever quite catch the 4070 Ti. Close enough, probably.

It might be worth keeping an eye on 4070 Ti prices, to see if they drop enough (before it fades into the distance) to warrant consideration. But this is basically fast enough that there's not much real-world benefit to the 4070 Ti unless it gets a lot closer to $600.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Great article Jarred. I will read it again When it is complete. (all nighters are not fun). I am really interested in the next two cards. It is nice to see some new models come out. More memory would be nice but I haven't had any issues with the 12GB in any of my 3080ti cards. I think this is the correct price point all said and done with. AMD could certainly release some new updated models too. That would shake it up a bit.

FYI, all the charts were present, just the text was missing. That has now been added, as I got some sleep. And unfortunately, I'm developing a nasty cough. I'd blame CES but I've been home since Thursday night so perhaps not.

The 'best' part of all of this is that I get to do it again this week! 4070 Ti Super and 7600 XT incoming... so much to do. And then when those are both out the door, 4080 Super! Nvidia is trying to kill me I'm pretty sure. LOL

I do agree with what others have said, and what I've said elsewhere many times with the 40-series stuff. Every GPU tier needed an extra 64-bit of memory interface width and 4GB more VRAM. I guess we're kind of getting that with the 4070 Ti Super, but if the 4070, 4070 Super, and 4070 Ti had all come with 16GB we would have had far fewer complaints — and the 4060 Ti with 12GB, naturally. 4060 should have been called 4050 and it can stick with 8GB, if it gets a price cut to $249.

But Nvidia made its decision on VRAM and bus width a couple of years back. I think from the bandwidth and cache perspective, it didn't do anything wrong. The problem is that capacity does matter in some cases, and AMD has proven it's entirely possible to do more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to provide. Gotta keep those profit margins high!

 

[CelicaGT]

Honestly, I haven't even played with overclocking due to a lack of time. With a bunch of games showing pretty big swings in performance since my last full testing (A580 in October), I had to rerun a whole bunch of stuff and that took ages to update. I would expect the usual 5~10% improvement in performance with overclocking, but without voltage increases I don't think it will ever quite catch the 4070 Ti. Close enough, probably.

It might be worth keeping an eye on 4070 Ti prices, to see if they drop enough (before it fades into the distance) to warrant consideration. But this is basically fast enough that there's not much real-world benefit to the 4070 Ti unless it gets a lot closer to $600.

Just enough of a difference to not feel too foolish for buying a 4070Ti on sale DAYS before the initial leak. If I bought today the 4070 Super would be a contender for sure.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Yeah, I have an RTX 2060 6GB which is still working fine and delivers 30-60 fps on every new game at med-high settings. as long as you keep RT off. Unless it breaks for some reason and I have to replace it, I'm waiting till next year for an upgrade.

I'm the same with my 2070 Super. In no way can I use my rather excellent 4K 144hz monitor in more modern games, but there's no way with the "new normal" price landscape of GPUs and the current economy there's little chance of me replacing it before the 5000 series at the earliest.