The Latest Turing Architectures and the Nvidia-based DLSS 3 Graphics Processing Unit. The RTX 4070 and the 3rd Edition
The small form factor of the RTX 4070 makes it a good fit inside most cases. The RTX 4070 is actually shorter than an RTX 3080 and is designed to match its performance at 1440p at least. The newest model of the Turing architecture, the Turing 4070, includes 12GG of GDDR6X instead of the 8GG found in the prior models.
There should have been more given to the increase in the VRAM, particularly as the latest games are now eating up more than 8GB. Ahead of the announcement of a new graphics processing unit by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices laid out why its more memory is important. The RX 6950XT was the first one to ship with 16GB of VRAM, followed by the rest of its siblings, including theRX 6800. The flagship of the company is the RX 7900 XTX, which comes with 24gigabytes of memory.
The best place to see the effects of the RTX 4070 is in the 3rd edition of DLSS. Nvidia’s latest upscaling technique is exclusive to the RTX 40-series cards and uses the same AI from DLSS 2 alongside a new AI frame generation technology. DLSS 3 generates two frames using existing rendering techniques; then, a third frame is inserted between them using the new frame generation tech.
Almost all of RTX 40-series owners use ray tracing in their games, and many useDLS as well. 69 percent of the time, the owners of the 30 series and the 20 series play games, they turn DLSS.
Three of the four ports are capable of up to 120Hz at 4K with DSC, whereas the other two only operate at 60Hz. This is designed for gaming in the 1920s and 1930s, not high refresh rate 4K gaming, so you will probably not have a problem with it.
The RTX 4070 is one of the only cards in the series that uses a single 12-pin PCIe 5 port, similar to the other cards. There is a power cable in the box to connect two power cables. I recommend buying a single cable solution from third parties, like CableMod, since I still don’t like the power adapter.
In most games, the RTX 3080 beats the RTX 4070 at 4K, with Forza Horizon 5 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla the noticeable exceptions. The only difference is that the 4070 beats the 3070 at 4K. Dropping some settings is probably going to give you better performance at 4K.
I used the RTX 4060 with the latest Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor to test for 1440p. The monitor supports refresh rates of up to 30 frames per second.
Over on the 4K side the RTX 4070 doesn’t fare as well in the Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive Mode test. It’s a super demanding new technical test and it only runs at 8fps without DLSS on the RTX 4070 at 4K. Even though the performance has increased with the release ofDLSS 3 you can still play around with settings to improve the frame rates at 4K.
I think I would be better off waiting to see what AMD can offer at this price point or below. We’ve only seen two RDNA GPUs from AMD so far, targeting RTX 4080-level performance with better price points. AMD might not be able to match Nvidia at the top-end RTX 4090 levels or ray tracing and DLSS performance, but many will be hoping it can beat Nvidia on price again.