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With a target price of $599, 1440p gaming makes the most sense on the RTX 4070 Super. High refresh rate 1440p monitors are also pretty ubiquitous these days, and make a good pairing with "mainstream high-end" graphics cards like this. So, we'll start with our 1440p results.
We have 15 games and 18 charts, with the "high level overview" showing the geometric mean across all 15 games. Then we break things into rasterization and ray tracing test suites. Many will make the argument — and they're not wrong — that the performance hit from ray tracing doesn't match up with the improvement in rendering quality. Even in fully path traced games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, you basically need upscaling and often frame generation just to hit reasonable levels of performance. So, weigh things in your own mind as you see fit.
We do have three "bonus" games that we're also testing, using Quality upscaling as our default in two of the games. Those results aren't included in our overall charts, as we haven't fully tested these games on all of the GPUs for this review, but they do help inform our view of how more demanding games in the future may run.
The overall standings are what you'd expect, at least from the Nvidia side of the equation. The RTX 4070 Super ends up 16% faster than the vanilla 4070, and comes in 7% behind the 4070 Ti. We'd be surprised to see anything else, considering the specifications.
It's also interesting to note that all three of those GPUs have the same 12GB of GDDR6X memory and 504 GB/s of bandwidth. The only difference on the memory side of things is that the 4070 Ti and 4070 Super both have the full 48MB of L2 cache while the 4070 has just 36MB, which means the faster cards have slightly more effective bandwidth.
Compared to the last two 70-class 'enhanced' refreshes, the RTX 4070 Super beats the RTX 3070 Ti by 43% overall, and outperforms the RTX 2070 Super by 116% — more than double the performance. If you have a GPU from a couple of generations back, there are plenty of good reasons to upgrade... or you could just wait to see what the RTX 50-series has to offer, probably sometime in the first half of 2025.
Looking at the AMD GPUs, overall the RTX 4070 Super comes very close to matching the RX 7900 XT. That's an impressive feat, considering it uses about 100W less power, has a significantly smaller die size, and comes with 40% less VRAM, and costs about $150 less. Against AMD's next step down, the RX 7800 XT, the 4070 Super delivers 24% more performance, for 20% more money. Naturally, our inclusion of ray tracing games affects the overall score, but that's part of the modern gaming ecosystem and is certainly a factor many gamers are willing to consider.
Looking at just the rasterization games in our test suite, the story among the Nvidia GPUs doesn't change much. The 4070 Super is still 15% faster than the 4070, and 6% slower than the 4070 Ti. It's also 47% faster than the 3070 Ti and twice as fast as the 2070 Super.
AMD's GPUs rank higher in rasterization performance, which means the 4070 Super only manages to outperform the 7800 XT by 8%, while trailing the 7900 XT by 12%. We'll look at a more recent rasterization game in our three game bonus benchmarks below.
Ray tracing tends to demand more from the compute elements in a GPU, so the 4070 Super leads the 4070 by 17% overall — only a slightly larger advantage, but it does come closer to the 22% increase in theoretical compute. It's also 9% slower than the 4070 Ti — again, in line with the difference in compute performance.
The past two generations of mid-cycle refreshes don't hold up nearly as well in ray tracing performance. The 4070 Super delivers 62% more performance in our DXR test suite compared to the 3070 Ti, and 141% more performance than the 2070 Super. Nvidia has doubled the ray tracing throughput of its RT cores on each generation, which shows up in these results.
AMD's GPUs, as usual, fall far behind their Nvidia counterparts in most DXR games. The 4070 Super nearly ends up tying the RX 7900 XTX, AMD's fastest GPU for now. It's also 15% ahead of the 7900 XT, and 52% ahead of the 7800 XT. This is all without even trying to account for DLSS, which we'll get to next.
Last up, we have three more recent games that tend to be even more demanding than some of the older games in our test suite. The first is an Nvidia-promoted game, while the other two are AMD promoted games.
Alan Wake 2 uses full path tracing, and it's the most demanding ray tracing game around right now, slightly surpassing Cyberpunk 2077. At 1440p with high settings on both the standard preset and ray tracing, the 4070 Super manages just 43 fps — and that's with Quality mode upscaling (DLSS or FSR2). While that's certainly not amazing, it's still definitely playable, and it's also 72% faster than the RX 7900 XTX.
We retested Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora for this review, using Quality upscaling (DLSS or FSR3) on all GPUs, and it looks like some of the recent game updates have improved performance a bit. The 4070 Super takes up its usual place between the 4070 and 4070 Ti, and this time it's tied with the 7900 XT and 34% ahead of the RX 7800 XT.
Our third bonus game is The Last of Us, Part 1, which has a reputation for needing lots of VRAM. Except, patches since the initial launch seem to have at least somewhat curbed its appetite for memory, judging by how the various cards rank. The 4060 Ti 16GB, for example, is only 11% ahead of the 8GB card — meaningful, but definitely not as punishing as some of the other games we've tested. AMD GPUs do much better this time, with the 4070 Super only managing to match the 7800 XT.
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