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Given the price, the RTX 4070 Ti still makes the most sense as a 4K gaming solution, though naturally it can run at higher framerates at lower settings. We'll hit that next, but with performance landing roughly at the same level as the previous generation RTX 3090, this is as good a place as any to start. There's no overall result for DLSS performance, since quite a few of the games in our test suite don't use the feature, but the ray tracing test suite below will include an overall DLSS2 result.
Also, we're going to use abbreviations for the game names. For reference: BL3 is Borderlands 3, FC6 is Far Cry 6, FH5 is Forza Horizon 5, HZD is Horizon Zero Dawn, MSFS is Microsoft Flight Simulator, PTR is A Plague Tale: Requiem, RDR2 is Red Dead Redemption 2, TWW3 is Total War: Warhammer 3, and WDL is Watch Dogs Legion. Those are the rasterization games; for the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) tests, BMI is Bright Memory Infinite, CTRL is Control Ultimate Edition, CP77 is Cyberpunk 2077, MEE is Metro Exodus Enhanced, MC is Minecraft, and SMMM is Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
With ten of the fastest GPUs currently available, the RTX 4070 Ti lands basically right in the middle of our rasterization benchmark results. Despite Nvidia's claims of 1.8x the performance of the RTX 3090 Ti, without DLSS 3 as part of the equation, overall we're looking at less performance than the 3090 Ti and only slightly higher performance than the 3080 Ti — which by extension also includes the RTX 3080 12GB. Overclocking did make up the difference, though you can also overclock a 3090 Ti (and use a lot more power in the process).
Put another way, if you're not going to play games with DLSS 3 support — and that's most games right now — and you're also not running ray tracing games, performance is about 8% higher than the RTX 3080 12GB, for approximately the same launch price. (We'll discuss performance with DLSS a few paragraphs down.)
The individual game results show a decent amount of variation, as expected. Against the 3090 Ti, the 4070 Ti was only faster in one game, Forza Horizon 5 — and that's after retesting performance with the 3090 Ti (the previous driver had some performance issues with FH5). The 4070 Ti was 9% faster in that game, but it was anywhere from 6–7% slower (FC6, MSFS, PTR, RDR2, WDL) to as much as 19% slower (HZD) in the other games, with BL3 and TWW3 also showing double digit percentage point deficits.
Stepping down to the 3080 Ti (again, our stand-in for the 3080 12GB that was also selling for $800 or less a few months back), overall the 4070 Ti delivered just 6% more performance, with a spread ranging from 6% slower (HZD) to 22% faster (FH5) — HZD was the only game where it didn't beat its monetary predecessor. What about the 3070 Ti? There it's a clean sweep, with a 61% overall improvement, though at least one game (TWW3) exceeded the 8GB VRAM capacity of the 3070 Ti.
Things aren't quite as promising when we turn to AMD's cards. The RX 7900 XT managed a 10% overall margin of victory, with only FH5 and TWW3 favoring Nvidia's 4070 Ti. Most of the other games show double digit percentage deficits, with BL3 and WDL being the "loss leaders" at 22% and 18%, respectively. The 7900 XTX increases AMD's lead, obviously, while the 4070 Ti beats the previous generation 6950 XT by 7% overall. Also note that overall performance on the 13900K was just 0.2% faster than with the Ryzen 9 7950X, with the largest difference being less than 4% — MSFS favored the 7950X while BL3 favored the 13900K.
DLSS 2 Quality mode improved performance by 9% in FH5, 46% in HZD, 40% in MSFS, 49% in PTR, 29% in RDR2, and 48% in WDL. DLSS 3 is also supported in MSFS and PTR, where it provided 93% and 102% more performance, respectively. Assuming similar DLSS 2 scaling from the 3090 Ti, the 4070 Ti would still be 30% and 27% faster in those games, thanks to Frame Generation.
Our more demanding ray tracing test suite doesn't really alter the 4070 Ti versus Nvidia story much, though AMD's GPUs drop in the standings. The 4070 Ti came on 6% slower than the 3090 Ti, without DLSS 3 to help out. It was also 11% faster than the 3080 Ti, and just over twice as fast as the 3070 Ti. It swept the 7900 XT as well, leading by 24% on average, and also claimed a 7% lead over the 7900 XTX, though three of the games slightly favored AMD's fastest card.
All six of our DXR games support DLSS, and two of them support DLSS 3. DLSS 2 upscaling improved performance by 82% overall (again, note that Minecraft uses Performance mode upscaling and skews the geometric mean). Meanwhile, in CP77 Frame Generation boosted performance another 47%, and SMMM got a slightly smaller 34% uplift.
DLSS is certainly an important add-on for ray tracing games, as without it the 4070 Ti only averaged 32 fps, while Quality upscaling improved that to 59 fps. That's enough to get all six games above 30 fps, and only two of the games failed to break the 60 fps mark.
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