Andrew Cunningham
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 is here. It’s the company’s first launch in over a year of a graphics card that could charitably be described as “mainstream,” both in performance and in price. It costs $600.
It’s not productive to keep going back to the also-$600 GTX 1080, at the time the fastest graphics card you could buy anywhere from anyone, and wondering how we got here from there (some of it is inflation, not all of it). But I keep doing it as a reminder that $600 is still more than many people pay for their entire PC, tablet, smartphone, or high-end game console. No other component in a gaming PC has seen its price shoot up like this over the same span of time; a Core i5 CPU cost around $200 in 2016 and costs around $200 now, and RAM and SSDs are both historically cheap at the moment.
To review the 4070 is to simultaneously be impressed by it as a product while also being frustrated with the conditions that led us to an “impressive” $600 midrange graphics card. It’s pretty fast, very efficient, and much more reasonably sized than other recent Nvidia GPUs. In today’s topsy-turvy graphics card market, I could even describe it as a good deal. But if you’re still yearning for the days when you could spend $300 or less on a reasonably performant GPU with the latest architecture and modern features, keep waiting.
The RTX 4070, and a 40-series refresher
-
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition is dwarfed by the 4090 and 4080 design, though third-party GPU makers can make bigger cards if they want.
Andrew Cunningham -
Most of these photos are just here to drive home how small the 4070 is compared to the 4080/4090 design.
Andrew Cunningham -
The 4070 is shorter, narrower, and shallower.
Andrew Cunningham -
A graphics card for ants.
Andrew Cunningham -
The Founders Edition still uses a 12VHPWR connector instead of regular 8-pin power connectors.
Andrew Cunningham -
The 4070 is even smaller than AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT, which are already more reasonably sized than the 4080/4090.
Andrew Cunningham -
An unsurprising array of ports includes three DisplayPort connectors and one HDMI.
Andrew Cunningham
The Founders Edition version of the RTX 4070 we reviewed is considerably smaller in every dimension than the Founders Edition RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, plus most of the 4070/4070 Ti/4080/4090 cards from Nvidia’s partners. The two-slot GPU is just 240 mm long (compared to 310 mm for the 4080/4090) and 40 mm tall (compared to 61 mm). That’s before you account for the extra space taken up by the 12VHPWR-to-8-pin power connector, which is still pretty bulky even though it only requires a pair of 8-pin connections rather than three or four. But it’s still a small enough card to fit in just about any PC case, including prebuilt OEM mini-towers and tiny custom ITX builds.
The RTX 4070 has a lot in common with the 4070 Ti, the GPU originally announced as the “RTX 4080 12GB” before being “unlaunched” and relaunched. They share the same AD104 GPU die, a smaller chip than the AD102 flagship used in the RTX 4090 or the AD103 used in the 4080 series. They also both use 12GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit interface. The 4070 has fewer CUDA cores (5,888, down from 7,680), but the 4070 and 4070 Ti are much more similar than the 16GB and 12GB RTX 4080 cards would have been.
The 4070 Founders Edition is small, but the included 12VHPWR adapter does add bulk. Some newer power supplies include a native 12VHPWR connector.
Andrew Cunningham
That 192-bit memory interface is narrower than the 256-bit interface used by the 3070 and 3070 Ti, which Nvidia has compensated for by adding 32MB of extra L2 cache to the 4070 (for a total of 36MB). That cache and much faster base and boost clock speeds are the 4070’s biggest improvements over the last-gen cards.
| RTX 4090 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 | RTX 3080 Ti | RTX 3080 10GB | RTX 3070 Ti | RTX 3070 | RTX 3060 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CUDA Cores | 16,384 | 9,728 | 7,680 | 5,888 | 10,240 | 8,704 | 6,144 | 5,888 | 3,584 |
| Boost Clock | 2,520 MHz | 2,505 MHz | 2,610 MHz | 2,475 MHz | 1,665 MHz | 1,710 MHz | 1,765 MHz | 1,725 MHz | 1,777 MHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 384-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Clock | 1,313 MHz | 1,400 MHz | 1,313 MHz | 1,313 MHz | 1,188 MHz | 1,188 MHz | 1,188 MHz | 1,750 MHz | 1,875 MHz |
| Memory size | 24GB GDDR6X | 16GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 |
| TGP | 450 W | 320 W | 285 W | 200 W | 350 W | 320 W | 290 W | 220 W | 170 W |
Because it shares the same Ada Lovelace architecture as the other RTX 4000 GPUs, the RTX 4070 also supports Nvidia’s new DLSS 3 and the accompanying DLSS Frame Generation (DLSS FG) features. DLSS is AI-assisted upscaling that takes a lower-resolution image rendered by your GPU and upscales it, improving frame rates at high resolutions while losing relatively little detail.