Testing the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070 Ti

You’re currently reading the English conclusion to the «PC Games Hardware» review of Nvidia’s new Geforce RTX 4070 Ti. You can find the entire original article in German by author Raffael Vötter here.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The new year seamlessly continues what made 2022 unique. Nvidia's Geforce RTX 4070 Ti, the first graphics card of 2023, is a good start, providing only a few points of criticism. Let's start with the elephant in the room: the price. No topic pervades the PC gaming community more, and the debut of the RTX 40 series in September 2022 at the latest made it clear that Nvidia had overstepped the mark. While the premium «Enthusiast» surcharge still worked for a flagship such as the Geforce RTX 4090, sales for the Geforce RTX 4080 are rather sluggish. Still, Nvidia's announcement of the Geforce RTX 4080 12GB finally made people sit up and take notice. And now that the RTX 4080 12GB has evolved into the RTX 4070 Ti, it’s evident Nvidia has accepted the controversy surrounding pricing. The original $899 MSRP gives way to a suggested retail price of $799 – with identical specs. Reason to rejoice? Like many things in life, it depends on your point of view.

Compared to previous graphics cards, even those from the same manufacturer, the Geforce RTX 4070 Ti is overpriced beyond measure. You could still get the Enthusiast model GTX 1080 Ti for 899 Euros in 2017, even with factory overclocking, while the RTX 3080 was only 699 Euros at the end of 2020. Now buyers need to fork out even more for less. Physics is mainly to blame: transistors can’t be shrunk as easily as before, and the world market leader in GPU manufacturing – foundry TSMC – is charging exorbitant fees for its services. Rising manufacturing costs and a desire for higher margins inevitably lead to price hikes for end customers. If that’s too rich for your blood you’re being reasonable, especially since there are definitely alternatives. With trade-offs, but they undoubtedly exist.

However, it’s not 2017 anymore, and certainly not 2008. Back then, you could buy real high-end GPUs for 300 Euros at times. Comparing the Geforce RTX 4070 Ti with alternatives in early 2023, Nvidia does a lot right. The new top-range graphics card has matched the Geforce RTX 3090’s performance, which started at 1,500 Euros a good two years ago. In quite a few cases, it even cracks the formerly 2,250 Euro RTX 3090 Ti, adding DLSS 3 as a bonus feature, and needing significantly less power for all that. With an average power consumption in the 250-watt range, the RTX 4070 Ti is especially interesting for anyone using older graphics cards and power supplies, as the energy requirements are roughly identical. The dimensions of many cards could prove to be a hangup; quite a few older PC cases aren’t capable of handling them. Apart from that, there aren’t many alternatives to the Geforce RTX 4070 Ti. The Radeon RX 7900 XT is on average 12 per cent faster in rasterising, but it costs at least 1,000 Euros and requires about 20 per cent more power. In fact, the price-performance ratio of the two graphics cards is equally good (or bad) when rasterising, whereas the RTX 4070 Ti offers significantly more performance per euro when ray tracing. All alternative graphics cards are older and thus have worse efficiency rates. But they are cheaper. The choice is yours.

If you'’ve read everything up to this point and are wondering why we don’'t cover the topic of graphics memory in the breadth you’re accustomed to, there’s a simple reason: the RTX 4070 Ti has a reasonable capacity unlike many other Geforce graphics cards. 12 GB have proven to be the ideal amount in numerous PCGH tests, while Nvidia’s 8 GB are often blown up. Even 10 GB are a limiting factor under demanding settings. The Geforce RTX 4070 Ti features the same capacity as an RTX 3080 12GB or RTX 3080 Ti, both quality cards. Since Ada Lovelace doesn’t feature an improvement for the PCI Express interface, staying with the old 4.0 standard, the new graphics card can be compared to the Ampere models under high memory load. For the intended use in (U)WQHD gaming, 12 GB fits like a glove. However, this doesn’t mean 12 GB are all you need! Gamers who want to play it safe in Ultra HD, use graphics mods or simply want to wait a few years should invest in a graphics card with more memory. Take the Geforce RTX 4080 (16 GB) or Radeon RX 7900 XT (20 GB). We’re currently working on a comprehensive VRAM advisory for 2023, but this will take a few more weeks. Until then, we’d like to recommend our previous VRAM reviews, which are still valid and transferable to the RTX 4070 Ti.

Long story short: the Geforce RTX 4070 Ti is more than just «the one-eyed amongst the blind». This graphics card is fast, efficient, and has everything you need to experience hours of smooth gaming for the foreseeable future. It’s by no means a bargain, but whether it's worth its price is subjecive. If you can (continue to) wait, you’ll probably get another chance to snatch an affordable graphics card in a few months time: the Geforce RTX 4070.