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While Nvidia would like you to think the RTX 4070 Ti can easily handle 4K gaming — and it can, particularly if you turn a few settings down a notch and enable higher upscaling ratios — it really comes into its own at 1440p. We do start to encounter CPU bottlenecks, even on the 13900K and 7950X, but overall performance now ends up at nearly 120 fps, compared to just 69 fps at 4K.
The 4070 Ti also managed to tie the 3090 Ti this time, and there's a slightly larger performance advantage for the 13900K over the 7950X. It's a bit interesting that the 4070 Ti performance improves a bit relative to 4K, but that's likely due to the 192-bit memory interface and 48MB L2 cache — it's not quite enough to fully handle 4K gaming without some hiccups, basically.
The 4070 Ti ended up 12% faster than the 3080 Ti, but only 44% faster than the 3070 Ti. That's because we don't have stuff like TWW3 tanking the 8GB card's performance now. It's also only 6% slower than the 7900 XT and still edges past the RX 6950 XT by 6%.
Since we're at a lower resolution and starting to hit CPU limits, DLSS doesn't offer quite as much this time. MSFS ran 3% slower, FH5 was just 2% faster, but the other four games improved by larger amounts — 11% in HZD, 32% in PTR, 18% in RDR2, and 22% in WDL. DLSS 3 can help overcome those limits, however, and provides an additional 99% boost in MSFS and 48% in PTR.
Complex ray tracing games still remain pretty GPU limited, with the 4070 Ti still falling 4% behind the 3090 Ti at native resolution, and the RTX 4080 delivered 26% better performance overall. The 4070 Ti meanwhile led the 3080 Ti by 9%, 3080 by 21%, and the 3070 Ti by 62%. It was also 21% faster than the 7900 XT and 5% faster than the 7900 XTX — and again, that's without factoring in DLSS 2 or DLSS 3.
With DLSS Quality mode (Balanced in MC), the RTX 4070 Ti performance improves by 64%. That pushes performance from just over 60 fps on average to more than 100 fps. DLSS 3 Frame Generation tacks on another 49% in CP77 and 43% in SMMM, or about more than double what you get at native without any form of DLSS.
We also tested "pure" DXR performance using the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, which runs at 1440p. We set the number of rays to the maximum of 20 per pixel, and compared performance with the other GPUs. Here the 4070 Ti came in third place, outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti by 12%. It's not a huge difference, but it does show that in cases where memory capacity and bandwidth are lesser factors, the 4070 Ti can beat the previous generation's top GPU.
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