Review Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super review: More VRAM and bandwidth, slightly higher performance

[Admin]

We've tested the Asus RTX 4070 Ti Super TUF Gaming, a 'reference' model card with stock clocks, to see how the new Nvidia GPU with 33% more memory and bandwidth fares. The change to the AD103 GPU with additional shader cores results in the expected uplift, but the memory upgrades don't seem to matter as much in most games.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super review: More VRAM and bandwidth, slightly higher performance : Read more

 

[Loadedaxe]

As always, very thorough review. I wish these insane prices would come down to normal levels.

If no one had credit cards, they would not be selling well at all. I am still going to hold out until the offerings from both AMDs and Nvidias next gen arrives.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Wow, that's... disappointing, honestly. Like Jarred mentioned, I too was expecting it to be closer to the 4080. At the very least, I thought it would consistently outperform the 7900XT at 1440p.

I had my eye on this card to finally replace my RTX 2060, but after seeing these benchmarks, I'm not so sure.

• Part of me wants to have the better memory specs, in case games coming over the next few years will benefit more from it (Alan Wake seems to show that.) And I may upgrade from 1440p to 4K, but not for at least a year. But futureproofing is hard, since I don't own a crystal ball.
• The other part of me thinks the 4070 Super is close enough in performance, and I could use the saved $200 to buy a 4TB SSD that I could make use of. But I don't wanna regret my decision in 2 years.

But with either choice, I'm sure I'll be absolutely ecstatic when I upgrade from my 2060. : P

In any case - awesome review, Jarred! You do great work. : )

 

[Colif]

Nvidia repeating what they did with 2070 Super.
4070 TI Super is mostly a 4080
2070 Super was mostly a 2080

Guess old play book worked back then.

 

[DavidLejdar]

Thanks for the detailed review! I don't care much for ray-tracing. So, if I'd upgrade towards 4K, it looks like the RX 7900 XT would be a better option for me - as it is a bit cheaper and with a bit more rasterization performance.

As always, very thorough review. I wish these insane prices would come down to normal levels.

If no one had credit cards, they would not be selling well at all. I am still going to hold out until the offerings from both AMDs and Nvidias next gen arrives.

It sure ain't cheap. In my case, I easily miss out on some other stuff though. I.e., it hasn't been until 2023 that I got me a smartphone (and then only a cheap one) - meanwhile at home, a rig with DDR5 RAM already, which should last some years.

Also, here in Germany, we have universal health-care and federal minimum wage of 12.42 Euro. So even with locally low salary (full-time), and after payslip-deductions (such as for that mandatory health-care insurance), and with not too high a rent (as not every owner here needs money for a golf course), it is possible to save up a bit for a rig (without worry of needing a fortune for medical expenses).

And some accountancy helps too. Like, when someone spends i.e. $2 a day on fizzy drinks, drinking water instead means a saving of nearly $60 a month, or $720 a year. Smoking? Smoke some less. And voila, $800 for a GPU, while having improved health.

Not saying that I will get me a new GPU soon, and no reason to overspend of course. And if I'd be living in the countryside, to begin with, I'd would likely need a car and pay insurance for it, even if driving only a few miles every day on empty roads. Etc. But if one can put aside some $40 a month (without interest rate), not that tough to have a modern rig.

 

[cknobman]

AMD will likely need to lower the MSRP of the 7900 cards.

Smart move would be to match the 7900XTX msrp to the new 4070ti Super.

 

[Devoteicon]

I wish these insane prices would come down to normal levels.

They are normal.

 

[Eximo]

All I can say is, go Intel? Need a disruption in the upper mid-range for sure. Even if it is 4070 Super / 7800XT levels of performance that would kick off some re-pricing.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

I wish these insane prices would come down to normal levels.

I'm not sure what else you spend your money on but inflation has affected every aspect of the economy. Just about everything I buy for a family of 5 is twice as expensive as it was a decade ago.

 

[Gururu]

All I can say is, go Intel? Need a disruption in the upper mid-range for sure. Even if it is 4070 Super / 7800XT levels of performance that would kick off some re-pricing.

100% agree and watching for it

 

[edzieba]

There's surprisingly little uplift in most games from the memory upgrades

No surprise at all: the 4xxx (and 3xxxs) series have not been memory capacity limited in any of the cards released thus far. Even the 4060Ti 8/16gb only started to see serious performance disparities when settings were cranked far enough for the performance choice to be between "not very good" and "still not very good", so 12GB/16GB is going to offer naff-all in real world testing.

Remember: buy cards based on actual benchmarking (ideally of the games you play), not based on numbers on the box.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

This should have been the 4060ti. IMO, the 4070/ti/super are a tier and price point above where they should be.

 

[atomicWAR]

While I am happy to see more VRAM even if its only marginally beneficial ATM, I was disappointed to see we didn't get a 9-10 performance boost. My guess is some over clocked models will hit that easily enough (or manual OC). Well its at least its better than what we had.

This should have been the 4060ti. IMO, the 4070/ti/super are a tier and price point above where they should be.

Yeah I can't argue with that. The gap between the 4080 and 4090 should have been smaller, making room for higher performing 4070 and 4060 parts. They had done that the price increases MAY have been justified throughout the stack in the eyes of consumers save the 4060 which was priced similarly to previous gen. Heck they might of even upped the price ~50 dollars in the case of the 4060, oh wait the 4060 16GB (cough).

 

[Phaaze88]

xx70 has FOUR SKUs... that is bonkers. Sure, 1660 had 3, but still...

Fudge ducks, man, fudge ducks...

This should have been the 4060ti. IMO, the 4070/ti/super are a tier and price point above where they should be.

I dunno... if we look at how a tier would get one refresh, thus 2 SKUs, then this could be the actual 4070 Ti.
4070 and 4070 Super would be 4060 and 4060Ti.
4060 and 4060Ti would be the long MIA xx50(Ti).

 

[artk2219]

"AMD remains competitive in rasterization, and many continue to make the argument that ray tracing doesn't really matter that much. The problem with that thinking is that it's basically sticking your head in the sand and saying that new rendering techniques — the same ones that have been in use by Hollywood for decades — can't possibly matter. There still aren't many standout examples of ray tracing looking massively better than good rasterization approximations, but Nvidia's hardware proves that significantly higher levels of ray tracing are already within reach.

Looking at the similarly priced 7900 XT and 4070 Ti Super, Nvidia leads by 34% in our ray tracing suite, and the gaps can grow significantly with games that use higher levels of ray tracing — so-called path tracing. Minecraft is a 'lighter' example of this, where the Nvidia GPU is 85% faster overall, without factoring in upscaling.

And we do need to mention upscaling again, as DLSS remains more widely supported than FSR 2/3, and still looks better in our opinion. Plus FSR can run on Nvidia while DLSS can't run on AMD. If you're in the camp of gamers that really dislike Nvidia and refuse to support the company's proprietary technologies, nothing shown here will change your mind, but there are clearly reasons why Nvidia remains the dominant player in the GPU space."

I wouldn't say that ray tracing doesn't matter, but I would say that right now, the majority of cards are still so weak at it, and it incurs such a huge performance penalty, that it shouldn't be a primary consideration. Maybe in another 4 or 5 years with the next console generation we'll be at the point where ray tracing is good enough in every GPU that it can be enabled without a massive performance loss. Until we hit that point though, its very much a secondary consideration vs standard rasterization, and by that point all these currently high end cards and performance levels will be mainstream anyways. Actually, I would even argue that ray tracing is at best a tertiary consideration, and should not replace price, or standard rasterization performance as the main consideration for the card that you pick unless you plan on doing something that specifically uses it. It's definitely something that will be used more in the future, but all these cards will be a couple of generations old by that point. Ray tracing needs a Crysis moment for it to really hit the mainstream.

 

[thestryker]

I'm curious if the "higher end" models will end up boosting better than this one did. The Supers are moving things in the right direction, but I can't help but be unimpressed. The sub $500 market is still on shambles with no sign of change.

I'm not sure you still have one and know it's a lot of work, but I'd love to see the 12GB 3080 get a run through the RT benchmarks to see the gap just the extra 2GB VRAM makes (obviously the extra bandwidth/2 SMs, but the results on the 10GB card are clearly VRAM limited).

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

No surprise at all: the 4xxx (and 3xxxs) series have not been memory capacity limited in any of the cards released thus far. Even the 4060Ti 8/16gb only started to see serious performance disparities when settings were cranked far enough for the performance choice to be between "not very good" and "still not very good", so 12GB/16GB is going to offer naff-all in real world testing.

Remember: buy cards based on actual benchmarking (ideally of the games you play), not based on numbers on the box.

This is not just about memory capacity, it's also about the additional 33% bandwidth and 33% larger L2 cache. Basically, we got 10% more compute and 33% more memory capacity, bandwidth, cache. I was expecting the general trend to be closer to 4080 than the 4070 Ti because of that, and in most of the tests that didn't happen — it's closer to the 4070 Ti.

 

[HideOut]

They are normal.

the NEW normal

 

[HideOut]

I'm curious to see what the OC attempts will be like. The core GPU is a tuned down 4080. Perhaps with a bit more voltage it'll clock up well. Help the rasterization some, maybe more so than a 4070Ti would.

 

[Phaaze88]

I'm curious to see what the OC attempts will be like. The core GPU is a tuned down 4080. Perhaps with a bit more voltage it'll clock up well. Help the rasterization some, maybe more so than a 4070Ti would.

Temper your expectations a little, as Ada is voltage limited, unlike the last 3 gens, which often ran into their power limits first.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

We've installed Windows 11 22H2 and used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (though critical security updates still get installed monthly — and one of those probably caused the drop in performance that necessitated retesting a third of the games in our suite).

Why 22H2 and not 23H2, especially as 22H2 drops out of support in October?

 

[palladin9479]

That's a lot more then "slightly higher performance", it's almost an entire tiers worth. It's what the 4070 should of been on release and not all those watered down models they were trying to pass off. Price seems a bit much but remember we've had 10~25% inflation the past few years, everything's price is up.

Out of the entire range, this is the only model that is worth purchasing so far.

 

[palladin9479]

This is not just about memory capacity, it's also about the additional 33% bandwidth and 33% larger L2 cache. Basically, we got 10% more compute and 33% more memory capacity, bandwidth, cache. I was expecting the general trend to be closer to 4080 than the 4070 Ti because of that, and in most of the tests that didn't happen — it's closer to the 4070 Ti.

Hmm it was generally in the middle between them and I suspect some driver voodoo is happening.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

That's a lot more then "slightly higher performance", it's almost an entire tiers worth. It's what the 4070 should of been on release and not all those watered down models they were trying to pass off. Price seems a bit much but remember we've had 10~25% inflation the past few years, everything's price is up.

Out of the entire range, this is the only model that is worth purchasing so far.

Well I mean I spent $155 for a dual core Opteron 165 in 2007, the entry level model, and in 2024 you can get a quad core 14100F, the entry level model, for the same price, twice the cores for the same price. Also in 2007 I spent $118 on 2x512MB DDR-400, and in 2020 I spent $125 on 2x8GB DDR4-3200. 16x the capacity for effectively the same price.

In contrast, In 2013 I paid $433 for an XFX 7970 Ghz Edition, AMD's flagship of the time. In 2024 you're looking at $1000 for the current flagship model, twice the price. In 2004 I spent $174 on a Radeon 9600XT, a great midrange card of the 9000 series, and in 2020 I spent $520 on a 2070 Super, again a great midrange card of the 2000 series, well over twice the price. In 2009 I bought an ASUS Crosshair III Formula for $200, a flagship AM3 790FX motherboard, and in 2021 I bought a Gigabyte X570S Aorus Master for $390, a flagship motherboard.

In the realm of computers, the only two core components which have drastically increased in price are motherboards and GPUs. CPUs have gotten more expensive, but they also have more cores. My 5950X (that I loathe) cost $548, 3.5x the price of the Opteron 165, but on a per-core basis it cost $34.25 per core vs the Opteron's $77.50, so on a per-core basis they've actually decreased in price over the last 20 years. Motherboards have gained a lot more functionality and, especially on the AMD side, have many more models with the highest end chipset on more affordable models (the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI 6E, for example, is $280, only 50% higher than the board I bought in 2009 and in line with inflation exactly). Compare this to GPUs where the $433 spent for a 7970 Ghz Edition in 2013 equates to $566 today, the price of some 7800XT, a lower tier model.

Sure GPUs have gotten more complex with many times the number of transistors and processing capabilities, but they've also increased in price far more than any computer component in the last...15 years? And they're going to keep increasing as long as there's a cooperating duopoly because they don't have to sell any consumer GPUs, they're making money hand over fist selling enterprise cards for many times the profit margin, and they know that whatever they price consumer cards at people will buy them because eventually you WILL need one, and you WILL buy one even though you will grumble about the price for years.

 

[Kotcha]

Great review as usual with tons of useful info for buyers.
I'm looking at a new system for MSFS in VR and it's hard to find performance reviews for VR gaming specifically.
Would Tom's Hardware consider adding a VR section to GPUs with the PCVR market jumping a bit forward with the Q3? Would definitely appreciate it a lot! I'm guessing this card will have big advantages with the VRAM over the 4070 Super since VR seems very VRAM hungry.