NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition Review

Will the most affordable 40 Series card to date get you excited about an upgrade?

The RTX 4070 review embargo has been lifted, and you have doubtless already been alerted to your favorite tech-tuber’s video about NVIDIA’s latest GeForce card. We have the Founders Edition (yes, they made one) in for review, and will now talk about it via text on screen.

This GeForce RTX 4070 arrives three months after the launch of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and at a price some $200 US dollars lower than the Ti version. Still, $599 is rather a premium price to pay, so we can only hope that the performance of this new GPU justifies it.

Specifications tell a lot of the story here, but not all of it, certainly. Let’s look at a table, shall we?

You will no doubt notice the amount of VRAM, which is 12GB of the GDDR6X variety. This reminds us of the short-lived RTX 3080 12GB, and keep the number “3080” in mind as we move forward.

Yes, this card is going to be somewhat memory bandwidth-limited as there is just a 192-bit bus (as with the RTX 4070 Ti), but L2 cache is up significantly with the RTX 40 Series so that is slightly mitigated – though to what degree remains to be seen with this new GPU.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition Card

Upon opening the box, which was as large and heavy as I remembered from the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Founders Edition card launches – I was greeted with a card no bigger than an RTX 3060 Ti FE:

The RTX 4070 Founders Edition poses with its big brother, the RTX 4080 FE.

A very modest dual-slot design, the GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition card has a TGP of 200 watts, which is so low that it actually matches the power draw of the RTX 3060 Ti FE that it so closely resembles – other than the fan configuration, which is a smaller version of the push-pull design we first saw with the RTX 3080.

Aside from its compact design, which seems quite incongruous after the RTX 4080, there isn’t much to say about this card’s aesthetics. I really like the last two generations of GeForce Founders Edition cards, and they have a premium look and feel that is unmatched in the industry.

On a less subjective note, you certainly won’t have any shortage of display connectivity with the RTX 4070, as it offers four outputs (one HDMI and three DisplayPort), and supports displays of up to 4K @ 240Hz or 8K @ 60Hz (with DSC).

Performance Testing

For each card tested all benchmarks were run three times, and the results averaged. Automated benchmarks are used for consistency. The test platform hardware and software used was exactly as listed in the table below:

There are some cards missing here, but after freshly re-testing a couple of 30 Series cards I decided to stop before removing the RTX 3080 FE from my production machine to benchmark it on this new platform (for now, anyway). Why? Well, after looking at RTX 4070 performance I think it would have been redundant (outside of RTX/DLSS testing, anyway). You’ll see.

Also, we never received a 3080 12GB for review, and that’s the card I wanted to pit this 4070 against. In any case, even if I was “lazy” and didn’t lose even more sleep re-testing graphics cards, I don’t think anyone will be permanently scarred by the omission. Still, even if this new card ends up being around the performance level of an RTX 3080, we can’t forget things like DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation, which you will need a 40 Series representative to enable.

I’m also writing this on Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive Technology Preview launch day, and lamenting the lack of benchmarks for this review. Oh well…

3DMark

We first look at a pair of 3DMark tests, with the venerable Time Spy Extreme (a DX12 raster benchmark at 4K resolution) and the newer Speed Way test (a DirectX Ultimate benchmark which renders at 2560×1440 resolution).

While these are of course “synthetic” benchmarks, you may find that they end up being pretty darn accurate once we get into game engine tests.

Ultrawide Game Benchmarks

Once again we will be looking at ultrawide results at 3440×1440, rather than the usual mix of resolutions (1920×1080 / 2560×1440 / 3840×2160) from most outlets. Why? Ultrawide is unique to the PC. Plus it is a tougher test than 2560×1440, while being a lot easier on your GPU than 4K. And hey, it may be unusual in the tech media world to test this way, but this can only help differentiate our results for the seemingly unlimited number of reviews out there, right?

Let’s begin with the original version of Metro Exodus, run at the ridiculous “Extreme” preset to help ensure that any bottleneck is on the GPU, and not the CPU.

I know I should have re-tested the RTX 3080 for this review, but after looking at the results it kind of feels like it’s already up there on the chart, doesn’t it? In this first test, a tough DX12 benchmark with no ray tracing or DLSS, the GeForce RTX 4070 shows an increase of about 14% over the RTX 3070 Ti, but is 17% behind the RTX 3080 Ti.

How about a less demanding title with higher frame rates? Here’s a look at DiRT 5:

In DiRT 5 at ultra settings (and no display scaling) we are looking at twice the FPS of Metro Exodus here, but the position on the chart is the same. This time the RTX 4070 is again around 14% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti, and this time it is 15% behind the RTX 3080 Ti.

Sticking with racing, here’s the more demanding F1 22, run with the Ultra preset and no resolution scaling (other settings used shown on the chart):

At this point I think it’s pretty obvious how these cards rank, with the RTX 4070 consistently between the performance of a 3070 Ti and a 3080 Ti. Basically, RTX 3080 territory. In F1 22 at these settings the RTX 4070 was nearly 18% ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti, and around 15% behind the RTX 3080 Ti.

We can’t overlook Cyberpunk, this time run at the Ultra preset with no resolution scaling or ray tracing:

This time the RTX 4070 was an impressive 23% percent ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti, and only about 11% behind the RTX 3080 Ti. The best showing so far for this new GPU.

Now we’ll get into some ray tracing. Let’s revisit Metro Exodus, but this time using the Enhanced Edition:

Without any DLSS this Enhanced Edition produces lower frame rates than the original version, but the relative position of the three GPUs I keep comparing is the same. This ray traced benchmark proves to be less challenging to the new RTX 4070, which is a comfortable 22% ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti, though it is around 14% behind the RTX 3080 Ti.

What about RTX performance with DLSS enabled? Revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 now, we are now on the Raytraced Ultra preset, though I’ll note that we are looking at version 1.61 here and NOT the new v1.62 with Overdrive (that will have to wait for next time).

Ok, not much different from the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition result. Once again the RTX 4070 sits between the RTX 3070 Ti and the RTX 3080 Ti.

Finally, in our brief look at DLSS 2 benchmarks, here’s the Bright Memory Infinite test, with the “Very High” RTX preset and DLSS Quality:

No surprises here. The full game supports DLSS 3.0, so we will eventually move past this standalone benchmark – as experimented with for the RTX 4070 Ti review. As mentioned already, we will revisit this GPU with DLSS 3 soon.

Power Draw

This is possibly the most impressive aspect of this new GPU, as it is able to give you that RTX 3080-ish performance level at an average power draw of just under 200 watts.

During a test run of 3DMark Speed Way, logging via PCAT (with direct hardware measurements of both the PCI-E connections and slot power) I measured average power of 192.3 watts during this run. Considering that the highest recorded momentary power draw was 221.8 watts, this will be an easy graphics card to power.

As this is a Founders Edition card it has the 12VHPWR connector – with supplied adapter, of course. I’ll be curious to see if partners adopt this connector across the board, or if we will see RTX 4070 cards with the more traditional 8-pin PCI-E connectors.

Final Thoughts

NVIDIA has once again released a xx70 GPU that is about the equal of the previous-gen xx80 card, and it offers better RTX and DLSS support as well. The MSRP is $100 less than the RTX 3080 launch price of $699, but $599 for a xx70 card is still not going to have people dancing and singing in the streets. Or on TikTok or whatever. It has been more than 2.5 years since the RTX 3080 launched, after all.

The RTX 4070 Founders Edition sits atop a small stack of GeForce cards as a pensive Godzilla looks on.

Inflation is real, people. I too remember a time when $600 bought a flagship. But we don’t live in that world anymore, and unless AMD releases a Radeon RX 7000 Series competitor at this price level we are simply looking at what the current generation has to offer at $600. The state-of-the-art, if you will. And art is subjective. Money is not.