Okay, let's do this.
Reviewing the RTX 4070 is kind of a no win situation for me
because on the one hand, everyone is furious
about the unaffordability of modern GPUs and rightly so.
But on the other hand, I have to acknowledge
that this is the best value proposition
that we've seen in years.
Then on the other other hand, there's the fact
that Nvidia who controls all of this appears
to be making this product look like a good value
by simply making all of their other ones a terrible value.
I really do wish I could just sit this one out
because by the time I'm done, at least some of you
will have misdirected your anger toward me, the messenger.
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Looking at the specs alone, the RTX 4070
is pretty underwhelming.
At just 295 millimeters squared,
this is the smallest 70 class GPU that we've seen
since the GTX 770 and with the same CUDA core count
as the RTX 3070, this is the first time ever
that Nvidia hasn't given us more shaders
generation over generation.
But wait, wait, no, no, there are some things
to get excited about here.
Boost clocks have risen a whopping 43%
compared to the RTX 3070 and the change to 12 gigabytes
of GDDR6X memory is a welcome upgrade
as we continue to watch VRAM usage in modern games
go from unreasonable to downright idiotic.
To quantify our excitement then,
the lab performed a whopping 984 tests across 11 GPUs
with CPUs from both Intel and AMD.
We're gonna have links down below.
They even threw in the Intel RK 770 for funsies.
Now, 1080p performance in rasterized games
might seem kind of irrelevant
for an enthusiast tier GPU these days,
but for many competitive gamers,
high frame rates are way more important
than high resolution.
And if you're one of them, the RTX 4070 is proper quick
with performance landing within 2% of the RTX 3080.
This might not be the leap forward
that you were hoping for,
but given the pricing of even secondhand 3080s,
it's kind of looking like a W, kind of, give me a sec.
At 1440p, the story remains the same
with the 4070 neck and neck with the RTX 3080.
But what really stood out to us here
at both of these resolutions
is how flipping fast AMD's last gen has gotten
thanks to their ongoing software updates.
The 6800 XT now enjoys a small lead over the 3080
with the 7900 XT coming in a whole 40% faster
than the 4070 and nearly matching the RTX 4080,
a GPU that costs $400 more.
Then at 4K, the 4070s W gets even more twisted and complex
because outside of Forza,
the RTX 3080 ends up outrunning it
by anywhere from five to 19%,
or at least it does until you turn on ray tracing
where the gap narrows significantly.
Now the story Nvidia wants to focus on here
is not how the 4070 beats last gen by 25 to 30%,
but rather on how it convincingly destroys the GTX 1080.
From my point of view though,
beating a seven-year-old card
is not the most incredible of feats,
unless your name is Intel.
It's just obvious that Nvidia is bringing this up
because they recognize the generation
over generation upgrade is not that big
and they hope that it's all you Pascal owners out there
that are finally gonna bite the bullet and upgrade.
Moving on to productivity.
In our benchmarks, there was one standout.
In Photoshop, the Intel ARC A770 was able to best
not only the 4070, but also the 4070 Ti
and was even within spinning distance of the RTX 4080.
I mean, I'm not sure that the average user
updating their Tinder profile is gonna notice,
but whatever hardware acceleration Intel built for ARC
definitely works.
Then outside of Photoshop,
ARC returns to its rightful place at the bottom of the stack
and the rest of the story remains largely the same as gaming
with the RTX 3080 and 4070 trading places
depending on the exact workload
and AMD once again showing off
that fine line driver development.
Outside of Blender, which remains a sore spot for Team Red,
the 6800 XT put on an amazing show
winning more titles than it lost at a lower price.
So if we're looking at the performance of an RTX 3080,
but at the price of an RTX 3070 Ti,
given how crap GPU prices have been
for the last couple of years, this is great, right?
Well, yes, but saying an RTX 4070 for $600
is better than an RTX 3080 for like, what did it peak at?
$1,600 or something like that?
That's like saying that a paddle to the ass
is better than a slap to the face.
Both can be fun when the kids are out of town
and we do have matching couples undies on lttstore.com
by the way to make this even more awkward,
but none of that is the point.
The point is that when compared to last gen, sure,
Nvidia gave us a solid increase in performance,
but they also gave us an equally solid increase in price
and this is the second time in two generations
that they've pulled this move.
When we went from the 1000 series to the 2000 series,
they did the same thing.
We got a nearly proportional increase
in both price and performance with Nvidia hoarding
the benefits of their new architecture
and using them to line their own pockets
rather than passing them along to the consumer.
You see, the industry norm has been
that as our manufacturing technology improves,
the same amount of compute becomes less expensive.
In this case,
Nvidia went from Samsung's eight nanometer node
to TSMC and five.
That's how they packed the same number of CUDA cores
into just 295 millimeters squared
compared to the 392 millimeter squared die of the 3070,
which is super cool,
but then if it supposedly didn't cost any less,
why the heck did they even bother?
Well, there are two reasons for that.
Efficiency and then probably more importantly,
the RTX 4090.
But let's talk efficiency first.
For the amount of performance that the RTX 4070 delivers,
it sips power.
It has a TGP of 200 Watts,
but Nvidia says that the average gaming power draw
is more like 184 and in our testing,
that was basically bang on,
which is darn impressive given
that the performance comparable RTX 3080
drew an average of 296 Watts during the same test.
Also a good sign is that the maximum recorded wattage
of the 4070 was just 233 Watts
compared to a whopping 412 for the 3080.
So not only will you be saving money
on your monthly energy bill,
but you also don't have to worry about a power spike
sending your aging power supply into the shadow realm.
Now you might be hoping that this means
there's a lot of headroom for overclocking,
but sadly it looks like Nvidia
has really locked this card down
and we weren't able to meaningfully improve performance
by tinkering with any of the knobs and dials.
I don't think that this efficiency gain
is why Nvidia decided to go TSMC 5N though.
And it might actually have been better for consumers
if they just took everything they learned
about the mature eight nanometer Samsung node
and then made better GPUs with it.
Kind of like what they did back in 2014
using the same 28 nanometer node
for both the GTX 770 and 970.
The issue though is if they had done that
the RTX 4090 simply wouldn't have been feasible.
It would have drawn too much power
and it would have given AMD an opportunity
to have a competitive flagship
which would be utterly unacceptable.
The 4090 is a true generational leap
coming in at just 7% more cost than the 3090
while being over 50% faster.
So then why the heck isn't that true
of the rest of the lineup Nvidia?
Well, because from their point of view
they did give you a generational performance leap
but through AI rather than raw grunt.
And in fairness, they aren't entirely wrong here.
By turning on DLSS3 frame generation
the RTX 4070 is able to easily dispatch the RTX 3080
and even deliver performance about on par with the 4080
before its AI assistance is kicked in.
Now frame generation may increase input latency
but Nvidia Reflex does go a long way
towards bringing it back down.
Is it as good as simply having a faster GPU
and not using any of these tricks?
That's a topic for another video.
Sadly our labs team really does need to do things like sleep
even if it's in their tents.
Adding to Nvidia's argument
currently there are dozens of games that support DLSS3
and the list is rapidly expanding
so you might as well just turn it on.
But detracting from Nvidia's argument
there are also tens of thousands of games
that do not support DLSS3
and will perform better on the 6800 XT.
Making the 4070s position more precarious
is the fact that pricing of 3070s and 3080s on eBay
has been in free fall.
Pro tip by the way, don't use buy it now
because auctions have been completing
literally a hundred dollars lower.
Now it's worth noting that the 4070
has some non-gaming generational advantages.
It's new so it'll have driver support for longer
and it comes with a warranty
and it features AV1 encoding and decoding
which is genuinely great and as a bonus
this thing has been shockingly stable
for being so early in its life cycle.
And you could learn a thing or two.
This is a really good product
but that doesn't mean
that we are unreservedly happy about it.
Nvidia's whining about how they simply can't pass along
any silicon cost savings just doesn't hold a ton of water.
Development costs for new process nodes
have increased substantially
but I also think that Nvidia does have some room to move here
if everyone else's pricing is anything to go by.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy our coverage of the CPU
that you should pair with really any of these GPUs.
The 7800X3D, it is flippin' unreal for gaming.