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Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti: Content Creation, Professional Apps, and AI
Modern GPUs like the RTX 5070 Ti aren't just about gaming. They're used for video encoding and professional applications, and increasingly, they're being used for AI. We've revamped our professional and AI test suite to give a more detailed look at the various GPUs. We'll start with the AI benchmarks, as those tend to be more important for a wider range of users.
Procyon has multiple AI tests, and we've run the AI Vision benchmark along with two different Stable Diffusion image generation tests. The tests have several variants available that are all determined to be roughly equivalent (in output) by UL: OpenVINO (Intel), TensorRT (Nvidia), and DirectML (for everything, but mostly AMD). There are also options for FP32, FP16, and INT8 data types, which can give different results. We tested the available options and used the best result for each GPU.
Unfortunately, Procyon needs to be updated to work on the RTX 50-series GPUs, so we'll skip commenting on these tests for now. The 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090 all fail to run any of the TensorRT workloads we've tried. Nvidia is aware of the problem, but we're not sure how long it will take for a fix to become available.
ML Commons' MLPerf Client 0.5 test suite does AI text generation in response to a variety of inputs. There are four different tests, all using the LLaMa 2 7B model, and the benchmark measures the time to first token (how fast a response starts appearing) and the tokens per second after the first token. These are combined using a geometric mean for the overall scores, which we report here.
While AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all ML Commons partners and were involved with creating and validating the benchmark, it doesn't seem to be quite as vendor-agnostic as we would like. AMD and Nvidia GPUs only have a DirectML execution path, while Intel has both DirectML and OpenVINO as options. Intel's Arc GPUs score quite a bit higher with OpenVINO than with DirectML.
The RTX 5070 Ti delivers a good result here, beating the previous generation RTX 4080 Super as well as the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Ti. It's 17% faster than the 4070 Ti Super, and 45% faster than the 4070 Ti. MLPerf doesn't use FP4 for these tests, so the additional memory bandwidth from the GDDR7 likely helps performance quite a bit.
AMD's 7900 XTX takes longer on the time to first token, but after that delay it does reasonably well; the 5070 Ti ends up being 15% faster, however.
We'll have some additional SPECworkstation 4.0 results below, but there's an AI inference test composed of ResNet50 and SuperResolution workloads that runs on GPUs (and potentially NPUs, though we haven't tested that). We calculate the geometric mean of the four results given in inferences per second, which isn't an official SPEC score but it's more useful for our purposes.
The RTX 5070 Ti again edges past the RTX 4080 Super in this test, and it leads the 4070 Ti Super by 18% and the 4070 Ti by 30%. That's on the higher end of the performance leads we saw in our gaming benchmarks. It's also 30% faster than the 7900 XTX.
For our professional application tests, we'll start with Blender Benchmark 4.3.0, which has support for Nvidia Optix, Intel OneAPI, and AMD HIP libraries. Those aren't necessarily equivalent in terms of the level of optimizations, but each represents the fastest way to run Blender on a particular GPU at present.
The RTX 5070 Ti only offers modest improvements over the previous generation. It's 8% faster than the 4070 Ti Super and 23% faster than the vanilla 4070 Ti. AMD's 7900 XTX falls quite a bit behind here, with the 5070 Ti delivering 84% higher performance in Blender.
SPECworkstation 4.0 has two other test suites that are of interest in terms of GPU performance. The first is the video transcoding test using HandBrake, a measure of the video engines on the different GPUs and something that can be useful for content creation work. We use the average of the 4K to 4K and 4K to 1080p scores. Note that this only evaluates speed of encoding, not image fidelity.
The RTX 5070 Ti has the same video encoding block as the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, so performance should be the same. And it is. Minor differences in clock speeds as well as run to run variations can account for the ~1% difference between the Blackwell GPUs. There's a minor improvement in performance compared to the 40-series cards as well, while AMD's 7900 XTX delivers the highest speed. However, our previous GPU encoding testing also showed that AMD had lower image fidelity.
Our final professional app tests consist of SPECworkstation 4.0's viewport graphics suite. This is basically the same tests as SPECviewperf 2020, only updated to the latest versions. (Also, Siemen's NX isn't part of the suite.) There are seven individual application tests, and we've combined the scores from each into an unofficial overall score using a geometric mean.
The RTX 5070 Ti falls behind everything except the RTX 4070 Ti models this time. Curiously, the 4070 Ti even manages to beat the 4070 Ti Super, which shouldn't normally occur. AMD's drivers for its consumer cards tend to be more friendly toward these professional applications, which is why the 7900 XTX claims top honors.
These AI and professional tests are ultimately just one aspect of GPU performance, and if you only care about gaming they shouldn't exert much influence on your choice of GPU. That's especially true of the professional tests. AI could become something useful even for gaming, maybe, but higher Blender performance will only matter if you're actually using Blender for 3D modeling.
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