Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Review: A Costly 70-Class GPU

We have a lot of thoughts about Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, some good and some not so great. On the one hand, you're getting better performance than most of the 30-series GPUs, including the 3080 Ti. At the same time, the price isn't really much cheaper than a 3080 Ti — you can still find a Peladn 3080 Ti on Newegg for $899, for example. Given the choice between spending $899 on a previous generation card from a relatively unknown Chinese company, or $799 for a new 4070 Ti from a known brand, yes, we'd take the 4070 Ti. But if we already had a 3080 Ti or similar card, this definitely isn't much of an upgrade.

At best, we saw performance improvements of up to 20%, with the average improvement being closer to 10%. Considering the 3080 12GB was selling for under $800 a few months back, with performance that often matched the 3080 Ti, that's a relatively minor upgrade at best. Toss in the new DLSS 3 support and things look better, but it's important to not get too carried away with the DLSS 3 framerates.

I've been playing games with and without DLSS 3 quite a bit over the past few months, since the 4090 arrived. In general, I'd say the experience can feel smoother with DLSS 3 Frame Generation, but it's not the same as "real" frame rates that are linked to user input. Take MSFS as an example. Without DLSS 3, you max out at around 80 fps using ultra quality settings. Turn on DLSS 3 and you can get almost double the FPS… but it feels more like a 10–20 percent improvement, not a 100% increase.

I get why DLSS 3 works the way it does, but ultimately you end up with having to choose between lower latency and lower FPS, or higher latency and higher FPS. Having a choice isn't bad, but certainly DLSS 3 is no panacea, and the emphasis Nvidia is putting on DLSS 3 performance gains really rubs me the wrong way for precisely that reason. "Up to 1.8X faster than an RTX 3090 Ti!" says Nvidia. Bollocks, says I! Slightly slower in many cases, and with DLSS 3 it can feel slightly faster at best, but nowhere near 50% or 80% faster.

Don't buy into the DLSS 3 hype, in other words. It can be a nice extra, but experientially it's often quite close to the threshold where you can actually feel an improvement. It can also cause artifacts at times — not something I really notice in normal use, but it's certainly not "perfect" rendering — and it needs a minimum level of performance to be useful. Portal RTX at 24 fps on a 4090 gets 42 fps with Frame Generation enabled, but without upscaling, but it still feels like 24 fps. That's because the user input is still running at 24 fps.

Beyond DLSS 3, the benefits Ada Lovelace has to offer become a bit more nebulous. Take AV1 encoding. Yes, it's definitely better than H.264, and Ada can do the encoding pretty fast. But from what I've seen, AV1 is no better than HEVC (H.265), and the only reason AV1 exists is to try and create a royalty free H.264 alternative. For personal use, it's basically a wash.

But pricing is where things really start to get messy. Yes, it's getting more expensive to manufacture GPUs on the latest process nodes from TSMC. How much more money does Nvidia have to spend to make a 4070 Ti and its associated AD104 GPU compared to the previous generation RTX 3080 12GB or 3080 Ti? I couldn't say for sure, but I'm sure it's more expensive, and Nvidia also has to recover its R&D costs. But we're still left with a 4070 Ti priced at $800 replacing the 3070 Ti that only cost $600 — and we didn't even love the 3070 Ti price in the first place!

Pouring salt on the wounds, inflation is real, and most figures will agree we've seen about a 15% increase over the past two years in the U.S. That means most people actually have less disposable income, which means spending even more money on a graphics card for gaming purposes becomes even less enticing. And with GPU cryptomining basically dead, you can't even use potential mining profits as an excuse for the upgrade.

At the same time, if Nvidia were to launch the 4070 Ti for $599, we can reasonably predict that scalpers would just buy up all the cards and then try to flip them for $800 or more regardless. I'd rather the additional $200 end up with Nvidia and its partners than give it to eBay and scalpers. Still, there's a lot of pain in seeing the previous "upper midrange" or "lower high-end" 70-class models push into $800+ territory, and a lot of gamers are going to simply say no.

So who is the RTX 4070 Ti for? Rich gamers that aren't too rich, maybe? Or rich gamers that didn't already upgrade to an RTX 3080 or faster card some time in the past year or two? People with enough disposable income to buy a high performance graphics card, but not enough disposable income to chase the RTX 4080 and 4090? These are all possibilities, but none of them seem like they'd describe a lot of potential buyers.

If you don't already have a high-end graphics card, or if you've been sitting on something like a GTX 10-series waiting for prices to come down and are finally ready to pony up for a new card, the RTX 4070 Ti at $800 is at least a reasonable option. Bang for the buck is a bit ahead of AMD's new RDNA 3 GPUs, and DLSS 3 may continue to improve. You also don't have to pretend ray tracing is bad, though we'd agree we still want to see more games where it really makes a noticeable difference in image quality.

The 4070 Ti isn't a bad card, and for some people it's probably not even a bad price. But it is expensive, and it doesn't offer a new level of performance. It's the same level of performance as the RTX 3090, more or less, with a lower starting price — over two years after the 3090 launched. It's the best $800 graphics card currently available, but we can't help but feel a lot of people won't really feel enticed to fork over $800 for this level of GPU. 

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