The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse edition ends up being exactly what you'd expect. The card delivers similar performance to other RTX 4070 Ti models, and you pay a moderately higher price to get the movie-themed extras. If you're not interested in spending nearly $900 on such a card, there are Zotac RTX 4070, 4070 Twin Edge, and RTX 4060 Ti variants with similar bundles.
It should hopefully go without saying, but the magnetic plastic backplate with Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse does absolutely nothing for performance. It might actually make the card run slightly hotter, as the metal backplate won't dissipate heat as well. You can always remove it and have the Amp Airo version, but then why pay for this spruced up package in the first place? And by the way, the backplate kindly notes that the movie is "Exclusively in cinemas" — what happens a few months down the line when it's available on streaming services? Maybe Zotac will send out updated backplates... (Don't count on that!)
We're now five months on from the launch of the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti. The extras that Zotac includes effectively push this card back into the unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB territory — a price that was deemed so much out of whack that Nvidia actually walked back that release. The 4070 Ti performs good overall, but not really any better than AMD's competing RX 7900 XT. Which represents the better card will depend largely on the games you play and whether you think ray tracing and DLSS are worthwhile additions.
This generation continues to feel like a disappointment for a lot of the models. It's not that performance is worse than the prior generation, and at least the cards are in stock online, but the era of big performance gains and improved values appears to be coming to a close.
We could also point at the 12GB of GDDR6X memory and ask, "Shouldn't Nvidia be able to put 24GB on a $800+ card these days?" After all, spot prices for 8GB of GDDR6 are down to just $27. But that would eat into the professional GPU profits as well as sales of cards for AI workloads.
In so many way, the RTX 40-series feels like a rehash of the RTX 20-series. Prices went up, a lot. Performance has improved, but you have to factor in special features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, aka frame smoothing. Maybe the RTX 50-series will repeat the 30-series and offer far more attractive MSRPs, and maybe we won't have a massive spike in cryptocurrency prices and mining that makes the MSRPs meaningless. I wouldn't bet on that, however (the pricing, not the mining), and it's likely a lot of people won't really feel enticed to fork over $800 for this level of GPU.
Depending on your current GPU, the RTX 4070 Ti may still be the best upgrade right now. It delivers performance roughly on par with the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti, though without the additional memory. And it's not like you can find 3090 or 3090 Ti cards for good prices either, as GPU prices for secondhand cards on eBay are equal or higher than the 4070 Ti, plus power draw can be substantially higher as well.
We'll end with where we started. If you absolutely love the new Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie, and you're already looking to upgrade to a new high-end graphics card, Zotac is ready to take your money. If you're not particularly concerned with the movie or $800 graphics cards, you can safely give this a pass.
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