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Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition Ray Tracing Gaming Performance
Ray tracing can be extremely demanding, and the RTX 5070 is far enough down the pecking order that it's going to struggle quite a bit at higher resolutions with RT. This is where you'd normally enable DLSS and framegen, to help with performance. But we're running native rendering for our tests — just remember that 4K with quality mode upscaling will look similar to our 1440p chart, and 4K with performance upscaling should look similar to our 1080p chart.
Most RT games end up being better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, because Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We've selected six reasonably demanding RT games for our testing, and we'll add additional supplemental RT / full RT / DLSS 4 testing on the next page (in the future).
Ray tracing certainly helps the RTX 5070 against the AMD competition, though the RDNA 4 GPUs are supposed to do better there so we'll need to see where the 9070 and 9070 XT land. Across our test suite, the 5070 is only a few percent slower than AMD's current fastest GPU, the 7900 XTX; alternatively, it's 11% faster than the 7900 XT.
Gen on gen, the 5070 still ends up being about 20% faster than the RTX 4070 — it's slightly less than that at 1440p, but that's partly because Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs still run poorly in Minecraft right now. And against the 5070 Ti, you lose about 25% of the performance to shave 27% off the sticker price.
Native 1440p performance remains pretty strong at 70 FPS across our test suite. Coupled with upscaling and framegen — or MFG — the RTX 5070 should be able to handle 4K in most games, even with all the ray tracing effects enabled. The only caveat is that certain games (like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) can use more than the 12GB of VRAM that's on tap.
Combining the rasterization and ray tracing results into an overall metric, the RTX 5070 lands just below the 7900 XT and 22% ahead of the previous generation 4070. That should also make it just slightly faster than the RTX 4070 Super, though it's not quite able to catch the RTX 4070 Ti.
RTX 5070 isn't a massive generational upgrade, but it does provide more performance at the same MSRP as the prior gen card. These days, RTX 4070 cards are selling for far more than their original prices, which suggests the 5070 will cost quite a bit more than $549 as well.
Ultimately, it's hard to determine exactly where the 5070 lands in terms of value, due to the uncertainties regarding retail pricing and availability. If there are enough cards to keep prices in check, it should be a strong overall competitor. Even if prices are higher, it might be one of the better options in a market of GPU shortages. We'll have to wait and see.
The individual RT gaming charts follow, again with limited commentary on each.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections, in general, don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects. What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games. Still, since there's RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite.
If you want a game where ray tracing is both clearly visible and actually makes the game look better, without totally destroying performance, look no further than Control. It's now five years old, and we're using the Ultimate version, but it's still arguably the best example of using RT well. And probably a lot of that is because you're running around the Federal Bureau of Control, an office space of sorts that has good reasons to have plenty of glass windows that reflect the scenery.
Note that Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs have some rendering errors in Control right now, and there's a hard 240 FPS cap that can impact the 1080p results. (This game is on the chopping block if I decide I want to trim down the number of tests I'm running.)
Possibly the most hyped-up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later, the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so, as with upscaling, it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.
We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off. However, we'll have more details on Cyberpunk 2077 with RT-Overdrive on the next page. It's also currently one of the first games with public DLSS 4 support.
F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing. We use the Great Britain track for testing.
Minecraft supports full path tracing, as well as DLSS 2 upscaling on RTX cards. We don't enable DLSS, and the game doesn't even allow it on the RTX 50-series GPUs right now. Apparently, it has some sort of hard-coded check for an RTX 20-, 30-, or 40-series GPU is our best guess. Or it's just a driver bug of some form.
The 50-series GPUs also underperform in Minecraft, especially at 1080p and less so at 1440p and 4K (the 'medium' results are mostly okay). Nvidia is aware of the problem and presumably working on a fix, but we've been saying that for over a month now.
Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxing out the settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM, and even 12GB cards can struggle at times.
One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor-agnostic fashion. Nvidia has also fixed a bug here that was causing Blackwell 50-series GPUs to underperform.
The RTX 5070 ends up ranking just ahead of the RX 7900 XTX, but still quite a bit behind the RTX 4070 Ti. That's a bit odd, as the Blackwell architecture was supposed to double the ray/triangle intersection rates, but perhaps some other aspect is more important for this particular test.
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