Nvidia RTX 4070 Review ft. Gigabyte and Palit

Over four months on from the launch of Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, the time has finally come for the RTX 4070 (non-Ti) to hit the market. Using the same AD104 silicon as its bigger brother, the RTX 4070 is cut down, with 23% fewer cores than the 4070 Ti, but with a price of £589 here in the UK.

The good news is, despite coming in 24% cheaper than the 4070 Ti, the RTX 4070 is only 18% slower, so that means this is the best value Ada Lovelace GPU yet. Of course, there is more to the story than that however, but let's first summarise the overall gaming performance on offer.

No doubt about it, the RTX 4070 is a fast graphics card. At 1440p, we saw frame rates hit up to 190FPS in Resident Evil Village using Max settings, and even in our most demanding title – A Plague Tale: Requiem – we're still getting a locked 60FPS using Ultra settings. The RTX 4070 can also dabble in 4K gaming, but just like the 4070 Ti, its relatively narrow 192-bit memory interface, and resulting 504 GB/s memory bandwidth, means performance does fall off slightly at the higher resolution.

To put the numbers into perspective, at 1440p the RTX 4070 is just 2% slower than the RTX 3080 10GB, though that slips to 7% slower at 4K. Meanwhile, the newest Ada GPU is effectively dead level with the RX 6800 XT at both 1440p and 4K, while it offers a 19% and 15% uplift over the RTX 3070 Ti at 1440p and 4K, respectively.

Ray tracing performance scales pretty similarly, though Nvidia still has a clear advantage here versus AMD. The RTX 4070 is 17% faster on average than even the RX 6900 XT when ray tracing is enabled, while it's just 14% slower than the RX 7900 XT despite being over 25% cheaper.

You can also count on DLSS 2 to boost frame rates for the RTX 4070, by 60-70% in some instances using the Quality mode at 1440p, while it can also be used to leverage some titles at 4K. DLSS 3 remains a strong value-add for Ada Lovelace GPUs too, with Frame Generation best used for alleviating CPU bottlenecks, with some hefty gains on offer if you use it in conjunction with DLSS Super Resolution.

Overall efficiency of the RTX 4070 is in-line with the RTX 4070 Ti. On average, at 1440p we found the non-Ti card drew 194.1W, so just slightly below its rated 200W TGP. That's about 80% of the power draw of the 4070 Ti, while offering 82% of the performance, so the 4070 is just a hair more efficient overall. It's not able to match the RTX 4080 in terms of performance per Watt, but against the RTX 3080, it offers similar performance for over 100W less power, resulting in a 67% boost to efficiency compared to that last-gen GPU.

It's been pleasing to test three cards as part of this review – not just the Nvidia Founders Edition, but the Gigabyte Windforce OC and Palit Dual – two AIB cards that should be available at MSRP. They've both handled themselves well, and while the Windforce does have a slightly more efficient cooler, there's really not a lot in it. It's just slightly disappointing to see the Palit Dual ship with an all-plastic shroud and backplate, whereas the Windforce offers a metal backplate which looks and feels superior. Still, neither card will let you down if you do end up splashing the cash on a new model.

All told, my opinion on the RTX 4070 is generally pretty similar to that of the RTX 4070 Ti – it's a reasonable GPU, but it's hard to be more effusive than that. On the one hand, it offers similar gaming performance to the RTX 3080 10GB, but with a couple extra gigs of VRAM, significantly lower power draw and with the bonus of DLSS 3 support.

Then again, an extra 15-20% performance over the RTX 3070 Ti is hardly much to get excited about, in fact it is pretty lacklustre it has to be said. That's on top of an 11% price hike over the £529 MSRP for the 3070 Ti, negating a lot of that performance improvement. Cost per frame is just not moving forward from the previous generation, in fact several deals on RDNA 2 GPUs result in a better cost per frame for the likes of the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT than what we get from the RTX 4070, though admittedly RDNA 2's ray tracing performance is a fair bit behind the 4070.

We do have to wonder about the longevity of the 12GB framebuffer too. A lot has happened in the last few months and several titles – including The Last of Us Part 1, Hogwarts Legacy, and Forspoken – are now causing real problems for 8GB cards, including the 3070 and 3070 Ti. As more games shift beyond the cross-gen period, having large amounts of VRAM is only going to be a benefit as developers leverage what's available on the Series X and PS5. It will be interesting to look back in 2-3 years and see how the land lies with the 4070 and its 12GB VRAM.

Ultimately, if you're hanging on to a 10-series or perhaps 20-series GPU and want to spend around £600 on a new card, right now the 4070 is probably your best bet – though we are yet to see what RDNA 3 will do in this price bracket. The 4070 won't go down as a classic, owing to the relatively weak performance improvement versus the previous generation, but it's an OK GPU. No more, no less.

You will be able to buy RTX 4070 starting tomorrow, April 13th. MSRP is set at £589 here in the UK, and we are told both the Palit Dual and Gigabyte Windforce cards will be available at MSRP.

Nvidia sent the following etail links for these cards which will sell at MSRP: Palit Dual(Ebuyer), Gigabyte Windforce OC (Scan), Gigabyte Windforce OC (Ebuyer).

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Pros

• Decent gaming performance at a similar level to the RTX 3080 10GB and RX 6800 XT.
• Best value 40-series GPU so far.
• Strong ray tracing capabilities for 1440p gaming.
• DLSS 3 is a promising new technology and a value-add for the 40-series.
• Much smaller Founders Edition, ITX friendly.
• Both AIB cards we tested performed well with low noise levels.

Cons

• Lacklustre performance improvement versus the previous generation.
• No real improvement in cost per frame versus 30-series.
• More expensive than previous xx70 SKUs.

KitGuru says: RTX 4070 is hard to get too excited about, but it delivers the goods for 1440p gaming.

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