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Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super doesn't fundamentally change the GPU performance landscape all that much, but what it does provide is higher levels of performance from Nvidia at (mostly) reasonable pricing. Of course, the RTX 4070 (and 4070 Ti) has been selling for quite a bit less than its launch MSRP for quite a while. You basically get linear scaling in terms of bang for the buck when looking at the 4070 and 4070 Super.
In our testing, the 4070 Super ends up outperforming the vanilla 4070 by around 16% on average — slightly more at higher resolutions and in more demanding ray tracing games, slightly less at 1080p and in rasterization games. The cheapest RTX 4070 right now costs $535, so you're paying 12% more for the extra performance.
But that's not entirely fair, as the cheapest 4070 isn't necessarily built to the same quality level as the 4070 Super Founders Edition. The non-Super price will drop to $549 when the Super cards go on sale tomorrow, meaning you get 16% more performance for about 9% more money. Which means the 4070 really needs to go a bit lower in price.
Our biggest concern is something that Nvidia pretty much decided a few years back when the AD104 GPU was in the planning stages. By opting for a 192-bit interface, any graphics card using the "mainstream high-end" chip would be limited to 12GB of VRAM. That's not the end of the world, but for cards that ultimately cost $600 or more, it feels very stingy.
The good news is that the L2 cache at least mostly overcomes the bandwidth limitations. In most of our tests, Nvidia's 40-series GPUs with 12GB of memory are able to compete favorably with AMD GPUs that have 16GB and sometimes even 20GB of memory. But whatever you think of the 12GB VRAM, there's nothing you can really do about it other than choose a different GPU that costs more ($200 more if you wait for the RTX 4070 Ti Super that's due out next week), or just give this generation a pass.
Nearly all current games will be fine with 12GB at 1440p ultra settings — not including mods, which can often bloat texture sizes, naturally. A lot of games will do okay at 4K as well. But we're now living in the era of games where 12GB is the minimum we want on a new GPU, and 16GB would be preferable — and we want 16GB on a 256-bit interface, not double the chips per channel on a 128-bit interface (looking at you, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB).
If you're in the market for a new graphics card that costs around $500–$600, give or take, the RTX 4070 Super now looks like the best option. It's not perfect, but it's a nice step up from the existing 4070, it's efficient, and it provides all of the usual Nvidia features. But we also said most of these things about the RTX 4070 when it first launched — and if you weren't enticed to upgrade then, the 4070 Super doesn't massively change the underlying prospects.
Given the choice, we'd take the 4070 Super at $599 over the RX 7800 XT at $499, even though it doesn't have as much memory. And all indications are that AMD has no intention of launching anything new that will compete with the 4070 Super — the RX 7800 XT and 7900 XT have already launched, while the upcoming RX 7600 XT targets the RTX 4060.
For the high-end gaming market, the 4070 Super is arguably the best option right now. Let's just hope the next generation sequel ends up with more VRAM.
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