Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Review — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Edition

Earlier this year, Nvidia released the RTX 4070 Ti — a renamed and slightly price-reduced take on the "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB. Performance was good though hardly revolutionary, features and specs a bit more questionable, and the price was $200 higher than the previous generation RTX 3070 Ti. It's on our list of the best graphics cards, but that's more about the lack of better value alternatives than anything else.

Zotac has teamed up with the new Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie in a campaign to try and attract additional interest. That's understandable, considering sales of dedicated graphics cards are currently at their lowest point in decades. Too bad there's no Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse game to go along with the movie, as the last couple of Spider-Man™ games have been quite good.

To be clear, the full name of the card we're reviewing is Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti: Amp Airo — part of the Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse inspired graphics card bundles line. Wherever we refer to the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti going forward, that's the card we're talking about.

[Side note: Yes, we're supposed to put the TM symbol next to every mention of Spider-Man™, because Sony. Also, Sony would love for you to go watch the movie, eye-rolls not included.]

We already know what to expect from Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture. There's also now RTX 4070 Ti Founders Edition, though there are reference-clocked cards. Zotac's Amp Airo model comes with a 2,670 MHz boost clock, 60 MHz higher than the base model, which shouldn't make much of a difference in performance.

There's a very good chance that everything you really need to know about this card is contained in its name. Are you massively hyped for the Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie? Have you already seen it five times in the theater? Are you hyped enough to drop over $800 on a themed graphics card? If so, Zotac has your back.

There's not much to separate the reference RTX 4070 Ti and the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo. You get a minor bump in boost clock, theoretically increasing performance by 2.3%. That's basically within margin of error for most benchmarks, plus Nvidia's GPUs routinely exceed their stated boost clock. We'll see just how much higher (if at all) Zotac's card clocks later in the review.

Just as important is a look at the wider GPU market that the RTX 4070 Ti competes within. The next step up from Nvidia is the RTX 4080, priced a significant 50% higher. That's a big jump, at which point you could probably talk yourself into going whole hog and buying an RTX 4090.

Incidentally, there's no Zotac RTX 4090 or 4080 Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse models — only the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070, and RTX 4060 Ti are getting themed cards. You can also get the RTX 4070 Amp Airo or RTX 4070 Twin Edge with the movie branding, or the RTX 4060 Ti Twin Edge, with the 4070 Ti variant we're looking at being the fastest option.

Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Edition

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Let's talk about the hardware and accessories you get with the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Edition card. Of course there's the card itself, which we'll get to momentarily. Besides that, you get movie-themed items including a magnetic backplate, stickers, a tote bag, and a Ztorm figurine (dressed as one of Spider-Man™, Gwen, or Spider-Man™ 2099). Oh, and a box with movie-themed packaging as well.

Some people will love this stuff, maybe. Others will just wonder what the fuss is all about. To each their own. Of course, there's also the 16-pin adapter, which Zotac has as a triple-8-pin variant. That's interesting, as many other RTX 4070 Ti cards only have dual 8-pin connections for the adapter, and Zotac's card isn't really overclocked that much. Requiring an extra 8-pin connector doesn't help anything as far as we can tell.

There's also a support stand for the card, something we've seen with a lot of the RTX 40-series GPUs. It's not quite as nice as some of the stands we've seen, but it's also a lot more compact, which might be good for some cases. I still think Asus's magnetic support stand is one of the better solutions, since the magnet should keep it in place (though I'd exercise caution when moving any case that uses a support stand).

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Zotac's card has a slightly rounded front (with the fans), with a thickness of 54mm. The Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse magnetic backplate adds another 2mm to the back of the card. With the backplate, that makes the card's total dimensions 310x123x56 mm — not the largest of cards, but definitely not something that would fit in a cramped case. It's basically a triple-slot card. It also weighs 1,224g with the backplate (but without the 16-pin adapter cable), or 1,142g without the backplate.

The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti does have a decent amount of RGB lighting, with a large "holographic" strip across the top that lights up. The default lighting scheme isn't great, though: It will show blue-green stripes for a minute or two, flash red a couple of times, and then go dark for a few seconds. Or maybe our sample is just a bit glitchy? You can of course change the lighting with Zotac's Firestorm software.

But the real missed opportunity is that there's no lighting whatsoever for the movie-themed backplate. There really needed to be a glowing LED behind Spider-Man™ in his various incarnations. Otherwise, in a typical PC with a window, most people will never even notice the extra bling. Maybe with a fully themed PC build, that wouldn't matter, but a plastic backplate doesn't really jive with people who go all out on case mods and decorations.

About the best thing I can say about the backplate is that, should you decide somewhere down the road that you no longer care about Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse, you can easily remove it and have just a regular old graphics card. Or give it to someone else to stick on their refrigerator, car, or some other metallic surface.

The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo uses a typical triple-fan configuration. The fans are modestly sized at around 88mm in diameter, and they all spin in the same counter-clockwise direction. Also present are the standard triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 connectors we've found on most Nvidia GPUs over the past three years.

There's plenty of heatsink fins, with five heatpipes running through them, to provide sufficient cooling. Again, this is a 285W graphics card, so compared to the 320W to 450W models that have been floating around for the past couple of years, it doesn't need an extreme cooling setup.

It's also noteworthy that the Zotac card doesn't typically even hit 285W. Across our 15-game test suite, the highest power draw we measured during our tests was just under 280W, and quite a few games used less than 250W — including Spider-Man™: Miles Morales, which only needed 225W at 4K on average.

Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Test Setup

Our graphics card test system was updated earlier this year to use Intel's fastest Core i9-13900K, with all the bells and whistles. We tested the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti card using Nvidia's latest 535.98 drivers that came out on May 30. Other GPUs were tested with previous drivers, though most cards have been retested in the past month (this time without Windows 11's Virtualization Based Security enabled).

Our initial review of the RTX 4070 Ti looked at performance across all resolutions and settings that we normally test (1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra). It also had professional and AI benchmarks, and performance results with upscaling including DLSS 3. For third-party cards like the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti, we'll limit our testing to 1080p/1440p/4K ultra, without looking at the other workloads — everything should be relatively similar margins as the gaming results.

Our test PC includes an MSI Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill DDR5 memory, and a Sabrent 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. be quiet! also supplied us with its new 1600W Dark Power Pro 13 80 Plus Titanium rated power supply. That would have been overkill, back before cards like the RTX 4090 were a thing.

We're limiting our test results to the latest generation GPUs, plus a few previous generation AMD GPUs. If you want to see how the RTX 4070 Ti stacks up against other GPUs, check out our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

We have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware as well, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

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