Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
We have both 1080p medium and 1080p ultra testing results for the RTX 4070 Super and other GPUs, though most people buying a $600 graphics card probably aren't planning to run medium settings and perhaps not even 1080p.
Keep in mind that 1080p is also the render resolution for Performance mode 4K upscaling, or relatively close to the render resolution for Quality mode 1440p upscaling. Not all games support upscaling, but it's an increasingly common feature and we still have hopes that some day we'll get universal upscaling support — like via Nvidia Streamline, which Intel has committed to supporting. One API that in theory provides DLSS, FSR, and XeSS support. So far, however, no games seem to actually be using Streamline.
But enough stalling, let's get to the 1080p benchmarks...
Again, there's nothing too surprising here. The 4070 Super lands between the 4070 and 4070 Ti, 14% faster than the former and 6% slower than the latter at 1080p ultra — and those margins shrink to 9% faster and 5% slower at 1080p medium, where other bottlenecks become more of a limiting factor.
Of course performance isn't a problem at 1080p, with nearly every game running at over 100 fps. Only Bright Memory Infinite, Cyberpunk 2077, and Metro Exodus fail to break 100 fps at 1080p ultra, though they're both still running above 60 fps.
Against AMD's GPUs, the 4070 Super comes in a few percent faster than the 7900 XT overall, and several percent slower than the 7900 XTX. That's also expected, as 1080p will be less demanding of the memory, compute, and L2 cache.
The full set of 1080p rasterization tests shows the usual mix of results, with overall 4070 Super performance basically tied with the 7900 XT at 1080p medium, and 5% less performance than the 7900 XT at 1080p ultra — or if you prefer, Nvidia's new GPU outperforms the 7800 XT by 7% at 1080p medium and 10% at 1080p ultra.
The individual results range from about 6% slower to 30% faster than the 7800 XT, with Total War: Warhammer 3 and A Plague Tale: Requiem being the two widest margins of victory. And compared to the vanilla 4070, you're getting 8% and 13% higher performance at medium and ultra settings.
Of course, no one is likely to upgrade from a 4070 to a 4070 Super. This is intended as a replacement for cards that are at least one generation old — and more likely two or more. If you have something like the 2070 Super, the 4070 Super delivers 73% more performance overall at medium settings, and 90% more performance at ultra settings — everything is a bit closer at 1080p than it was at 1440p ultra.
Ray tracing at native resolution can be a bit much at 1440p, but at 1080p every game still breaks the 60 fps mark, even at ultra settings. There are games where that won't be the case (such as Alan Wake 2, which we'll get to in a bit), but those should be the exception rather than the rule for the next couple of years.
Ray tracing as usual lets Nvidia's architecture strut its stuff, and overall performance from the 4070 Super edges past the RX 7900 XTX. Mostly that's because of Minecraft, where it has a 28–37 percent lead, and several of the DXR games still run faster on AMD's top card — thanks no doubt to the 24GB of VRAM and higher power limit.
How about our three bonus games? Given how demanding Alan Wake 2 can bet at high settings (i.e. path tracing), it's impressive that it can even break 60 fps. AMD's GPUs are well off that mark, with even the 4060 Ti coming out ahead of the 7900 XTX. Medium with low RT settings isn't nearly so harsh, with the 4070 Super managing 82 fps.
The other two games are also much easier to run. Avatar gets 129 fps (with upscaling) at 1080p Ultra settings, landing between the 7900 XT and XTX. That's because Avatar uses ray tracing for shadows and reflections, or at least that's our most likely explanation.
The Last of Us again favors AMD's GPUs more than many of the other games we tested, with the 4070 Super coming in just behind the RX 7800 XT. We haven't tested these games on a few of the GPUs, so we're limited to 13 of the cards for these charts.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
