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.
Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition: Good if the price doesn't skyrocket
Of the four Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs launched so far, the RTX 5070 is neither the most enticing nor the least enticing. Raw performance obviously favors the RTX 5090, with the 5080 a rather large step down. The 5070 Ti offers most of what the 5080 provides but with a significantly lower starting price. And then we have the RTX 5070, boldly proclaiming a $549 launch MSRP.
Sadly, graphics card prices right now are starting to feel a lot like the cryptomining heyday of 2021. We aren't seeing double or triple the MSRP, yet, but most of the new generation are selling at 30% or more above the base price, with some models priced 50% or more above MSRP. It's another harsh lesson in supply and demand economics, and right now, there just isn't enough supply to keep prices in check. As we recommended during pretty much all of 2021: Don't buy a new graphics card if you can avoid it — unless you're not particularly concerned with getting a good deal.
Looking just at performance, the RTX 5070 Founders Edition, and by extension the RTX 5070 in general, offer a decent step up from the prior generation. It's not the "nearly twice the performance" marketing that Nvidia claims, as that requires the use of MFG4X along with some seriously tinted goggles to make you believe that AI-generated frames are the same as rendered frames. But it's a solid 20% improvement baseline, ostensibly at the same price as the outgoing 4070. And in certain workloads — like with MFG or in AI tasks that can leverage the FP4 support — it can deliver sizable gains.
If you could buy the 5070 for $549 right now, that would be a good deal. The cards go on sale on March 5 (tomorrow), and we'd bet heavily they'll sell out almost instantly. And based on what we're seeing from the 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti, not to mention all of the sold-out prior generation GPUs, we have to believe the supply will remain constrained for a long time — possibly throughout 2025, though we really hope we're wrong on that front.
With the current market conditions, how do we even score reviews like this? That's the dilemma we face. Nvidia says the price should start at $549, but we all "know" that's not going to happen. (We could be wrong; only time will tell.) Depending on the actual pricing and availability, this could end up being anything from a 3.0 star to a 4.5 star part; price is a critical factor in that. We originally considered a 4-star score, but after pondering market conditions and the lack of major advancements relative to the prior generation, we've elected to drop it to a 3.5-star score.
A 4-star score would be for the card if you can actually buy it for $549. No, you almost certainly won't be able to buy one tomorrow for that price. So how do we score something that will almost inevitably sell out? And when demand is so much higher than the expected supply, it hardly matters what we score it — it's still going to sell.
If you see RTX 5070 cards going for $899 tomorrow, that's a completely different graphics card than what we've reviewed and would rank lower, but we still have no way of knowing how prices will evolve over time. There's also the delayed 5070 Founders Edition availability, which we were notified about just a couple of hours before reviews went live (and which we didn't actually see until after the review posting). <Sigh.> At $650 or $750 or however high the prices go, it radically changes the value proposition — not that the value proposition on any GPUs is good right now.
AI demand eclipses gaming GPU demand
The fundamental problem right now is that there's only so much silicon manufacturing capacity to go around. TSMC has the best 5nm-class and 3nm-class processes right now, and the line of companies wanting to order wafers has gotten quite large. Many of the orders are for AI hardware, including Nvidia's own Blackwell B200 GPUs, which accounted for 10X more revenue last year than the gaming GPU revenue. You don't have to be a CEO or a math genius to figure out where Nvidia's priorities lie right now.
And it's not just Nvidia. AMD has already announced prices of $549 for the RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT, both of which will have reviews posted tomorrow. If those prices hold up — at all — we will be incredibly shocked. AIBs and retailers are likely to jack up prices in short order, probably by 25% or more.
And unlike GPU mining, where we at last got relief when Ethereum switched to proof of stake and mining it became unprofitable, AI doesn't appear to be going away any time soon. There are multiple 100,000+ AI compute clusters planned for 2025, with some even talking about a million GPUs. At something like $50,000 per B200 (possibly double that), Nvidia gets to choose between $12 billion or so in annual GPU sales for gaming, versus an order of magnitude more money from data center GPUs. Until and unless the AI bubble bursts, gaming graphics cards are likely to remain more expensive than they were in 2022–2024.
If the RTX 5070 is available at its MSRP, it's a modest generational upgrade that we would happily recommend. That's about the best we can say or hope for. We'll discuss tomorrow how it stacks up against AMD's RX 9070 that has the same $549 MSRP. In normal times, there would be heated debates about which one is better, whether DLSS beats FSR, and if AMD or Nvidia makes better drivers. The winner this round, however, is going to be the company that produces more GPUs to sell to consumers.
We suspect AMD will be more willing to use the limited allocation of wafers from TSMC on GPUs, but it would be a major break with tradition for AMD to actually sell more consumer GPUs than Nvidia. And Nvidia would probably be willing to sacrifice enough of its potential data center profits just to stay ahead of AMD. We'll have to wait and see.
Longer term, there's a lot more manufacturing capacity that will come online in the coming year or two, and even more coming in the next five years. At some point, it's inevitable that the market gets saturated and pricing will start to come back down. That or the AI singularity hits and we all get borgified and absorbed into the machine consciousness. [Kidding! Mostly...]
Lacking a fool-proof crystal ball, we have to go by what Nvidia has listed as the official price. Maybe the RTX 5070 will actually sell for $549 at some point, with enough stock that anyone who wants one will be able to purchase a card from Amazon, Newegg, B&H, etc. If that happens, the RTX 5070 will be a good option, and while MFG is vastly overhyped in terms of what it does for performance, it's still nice to have options. We just wish there were more options for graphics cards in general right now.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
