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The 4K gaming results range from purely academic (i.e. the most demanding ray tracing games) to lighter fare that still runs quite well on the RTX 4070 Super. We're not going to put in a ton of commentary here, as the overall standings mostly echo what we've already seen.
About the only thing worth mentioning is that a few games can start to run into VRAM limitations with 12GB — none of our test games seemed to have severe issues, but we do know of at least a few that can start to encounter stuttering. Naturally, turning down the settings a notch is a good way to overcome such hurdles.
At 4K ultra, the superior bandwidth and VRAM capacity puts the 7900 XT clearly ahead of the 4070 Super. As usual, it's from the rasterization gaming results and ray tracing counterbalances that, but upscaling is basically required in a lot of modern games to get above 60 fps at 4K.
Most of the games still break 60 fps even at 4K when doing pure rasterization. A Plague Tale, Flight Simulator, and Total War: Warhammer 3 are the exceptions, and two of those support DLSS and DLSS 3 to help smooth things out. This is another good view of how much better AMD does in rasterization, as the 7900 XT is 18% faster than the RTX 4070 Super here.
There's not too much to say about heavy ray tracing games at 4K ultra. The RTX 4070 Super does better than some of the lower tier GPUs, and nearly matches the 7900 XTX, but it's not providing stellar performance by any stretch. Upscaling would naturally help quite a lot — it's why so many of the AMD and Nvidia 4K results are with Performance mode upscaling (i.e. 1080p upscaled to 4K).
As usual, the AMD and Nvidia results get reversed with most RT games. Where AMD's 7900 XT was 18% faster in the rasterization results, the 4070 Super is 14% faster in overall ray tracing results. And the more ray tracing that's used, like in Minecraft, the more things favor Nvidia's GPUs. Which brings us to the bonus games.
Our bonus games show how future releases might perform. Needless to say, Alan Wake 2 isn't a great experience without higher levels of upscaling and frame generation. Avatar on the other hand still runs reasonably well with Quality mode upscaling, and The Last of Us at least breaks into playable territory with over 30 fps.
We just mentioned how heavier use of ray tracing favors Nvidia more, and Alan Wake 2 with path tracing shows exactly what we mean. Cyberpunk 2077 in RT-Overdrive mode shows similar gains. Here, the 4070 Super is over twice as fast as the RX 7900 XT — though of course neither GPU is at all playable. Performance mode upscaling will at least push the 4070 Super above 30 fps, and frame generation can smooth things out and get closer to 60 fps.
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