Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition review: kicking RTX 3090 to the curb

The paint is barely dry on GeForce RTX 4070, yet here we are, nine months later, and a successor is already with us. Nvidia has felt the need to reinvigorate its RTX 4000 Series portfolio with a range of new additions arriving under the Super moniker. Cue a juggling of specifications, a pricing shuffle, and a trio of new cards hoping to attract your attention.

Festivities get underway with RTX 4070 Super, arriving in stores in January 16 at $599 (£579). Hot on its heels, RTX 4070 Ti Super arrives at $799 (£769) on January 23. Rounding out the trio, RTX 4080 Super lands January 30 for a cool $999 (£959). Sorry, performance fiends, the fabled RTX 4090 Ti is nowhere to be seen as yet, meaning RTX 4090 remains top dog for the foreseeable future.

Plenty to digest, so let’s not break from tradition. Here’s your Club386 Table of Doom™.

GeForce RTX	4080 Super	4080	4070 Ti Super	4070 Ti	4070 Super	4070
Launch date	Jan 2024	Nov 2022	Jan 2024	Jan 2023	Jan 2024	Apr 2023
Codename	AD103	AD103	AD103	AD104	AD104	AD104
Architecture	Ada	Ada	Ada	Ada	Ada	Ada
Process (nm)	4	4	4	4	4	4
Transistors (bn)	45.9	45.9	45.9	35.8	35.8	35.8
Die size (mm2)	378.6	378.6	378.6	294.5	294.5	294.5
SMs	80 of 80	76 of 80	66 of 80	60 of 60	56 of 60	46 of 60
CUDA cores	10,240	9,728	8,448	7,680	7,168	5,888
Boost clock (MHz)	2,550	2,505	2,610	2,610	2,475	2,475
Peak FP32 TFLOPS	52	48.7	44	40.1	36	29.1
RT cores	80	76	66	60	56	46
RT TFLOPS	121	112.7	102	92.7	82.1	67.4
Tensor cores	320	304	264	240	224	184
ROPs	112	112	96	80	80	64
Texture units	320	304	264	240	224	184
Memory size (GB)	16	16	16	12	12	12
Memory type	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X
Memory bus (bits)	256	256	256	192	192	192
Memory clock (Gbps)	23	22.4	21	21	21	21
Bandwidth (GB/s)	736	717	672	504	504	504
L2 cache (MB)	64	64	48	48	48	36
PCIe interface	4.0 x16	4.0 x16	4.0 x16	4.0 x16	4.0 x16	4.0 x16
Power (watts)	320	320	285	285	220	200
Founders Edition	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Launch MSRP ($)	999	1,199	799	799	599	599

Initial reactions might be one of indifference, as at first glance it appears little has changed. Yet the devil is in the details, and there are some noteworthy nuggets to pore over.

Super Refresh

RTX 4080 Super – full review coming soon – is fascinating for the right reasons. Marginally quicker than its RTX 4080 predecessor, the Super edition is a fully enabled implementation of AD103 that sees a welcome 17 per cent price cut. What the original should have been, I can hear you thinking, but better late than never, right?

RTX 4070 Ti Super, available only from partners, shifts gears by migrating from AD104 to AD103, making it a higher-end proposition by nature. Core count climbs by 10 per cent, from 7,680 to 8,448, and there’s goodness at the back end, too, where memory capacity increases from 12GB to 16GB. Factor in a widened bus – 192 vs. 256 bits – and you have a noticeably superior proposition at the same $799 fee. Apologies, early adopters, but them’s the breaks.

Third and final, RTX 4070 Super is the first 2024 card to break cover, and in our estimation, the most intriguing. Pricing stays at $599, making it accessible to a wide number of users, while front-end specifications are bolstered considerably. Nearing RTX 4070 Ti in makeup, 4070 Super enables 56 of 60 SMs, resulting in 7,168 cores. That’s over a 20 per cent increase over what was previously available at this price point. Welcome news indeed, as is a larger 48MB pool of L2 cache. You can’t have it all at $599, mind, as evidenced by memory capacity remaining at 12GB of GDDR6X via a 192-bit bus. If you want a worthwhile uptick in available bandwidth, prepare to budget for RTX 4070 Ti Super as the next-best destination.

A near-25% per cent increase in TFLOPS throughput is the talking point, though you will find a few other small tweaks if you look hard enough. While boost clock for RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Super remains identical at 2,475MHz, base clock for the latter climbs fractionally from 1,920 to 1,980MHz. Think slightly quicker in-game frequencies, all contributing to an incrementally higher 220W TDP.

Blacked Out FE

Specification adjustments are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, yet it is nice to see Nvidia has also taken the time to introduce a visual refresh. And it’s a makeover worth knowing about as RTX 4070 Super is, in our estimation, the sexiest graphics card Team Green has ever produced. That’s saying something given RTX 4070 regular is a fine-looking thing, but the Super is just phwoar!

It hasn’t taken anything revolutionary to turn our heads, as Nvidia has simply cut the contrast to create a darker, moodier aesthetic. Nevertheless, the end result looks fantastic. The black-anodised aluminum shroud is right up our street, and as a an x70 Series part, dual-slot dimensions of 244mm x 112mm remain highly agreeable.

Display outputs, as expected, remain as one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4. Power, meanwhile, is sourced via a 12VHPWR connector that, contrary to speculation, isn’t going anywhere. As before, a dual-eight-pin adaptor is included in the box if needed. Nvidia continues to recommend a 650W PSU as a minimum, and though 500W ought to do it, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Outside of heightened core count, the rest of the RTX formula remains intact. We won’t dig too deep into the Ada Lovelace architecture here – refer to our original RTX 4070 review if you need a refresher – but rest assured the latest RTX feature set is supported through 4th Gen Tensor Cores, 3rd Gen RT Cores and an AV1 encoder.

DLSS naturally features heavily in Nvidia’s internal performance comparisons, yet even in terms of pure rasterisation, RTX 4070 Super has plenty to shout about. Going solely by specifications, this $599 GPU ought to deliver a bigger punch than 2020’s RTX 3090, which if you recall launched at a jaw-dropping $1,499. That’s progress.

On paper, the promise of RTX 3090-like performance in a smaller, more efficient, feature-packed, and affordable package sounds a tantalising proposition. Let’s now see if the Club386 benchmark suite agrees.

Performance

Our trusty test platforms are nearing retirement, yet it is it testament to the Ryzen 9 5950X build that our twin AM4 rigs continue to function reliably irrespective of the numerous graphics cards thrown at it.

3DMark

Suffering scroll-wheel fatigue? Sorry about that, but we figured more cards of the older variety would serve as welcome markers for those seeking to upgrade. Straight off the bat, RTX 4070 Super scores almost 15% higher than RTX 4070 regular in 3DMark Time Spy.

Enough to propel the card above RTX 3090 and maintain a healthy margin over the nearest rival from AMD, Radeon RX 6800 XT. The GeForce crop, as you ought to know by now, is in another league entirely when it comes to raytracing performance.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

RTX 4070 Super usurping RTX 4070 Ti is most likely a result of the very latest driver update, yet there’s no denying the latter’s ill-fated existence. What was once the RTX 4080 12GB, RTX 4070 Ti found a new lease of life as a partner-exclusive card and has now been unceremoniously rendered moot by RTX 4070 Super. Side note: expect RTX 4070 Ti price drops to become more common as partners move to shift existing stock.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077, with raytracing enabled, reduces most Radeons to a whimpering wreck. RTX 4070 Super is much better than the competition at managing such loads, and once again, scores 15% higher than original RTX 4070.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

At $599, this is shaping up to be the quintessential QHD graphics card. Performance is well suited to a high-refresh monitor, and hard-hitting cards from the previous generation are in the firing line. RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6950 XT, eat your heart out.

Forza Horizon 5

Still rocking a GTX 1070? Moving to RTX 4070 Super nets a monumental 230% performance increase. RTX 2070 Super beginning to struggle? RTX 4070 practically doubles your in-game framerate. As an upgrade from those older cards, Nvidia’s latest makes a lot of sense.

DLSS 3

It wouldn’t be an RTX 40 Series review without mentioning DLSS, which in fairness is growing all the more impressive with each iteration. The promise of both upscaling and frame generation is genuine, and when implemented correctly, leads to huge performance gains with barely any discernible impact on visual fidelity. Cyberpunk 2077 is a fine example of a developer getting it right.

Granular options provide plenty of choice. Remember, Super Resolution provides a choice of upscaling settings; Performance works its magic on a 1920×1080 render, Balanced works at 2227×1253, and Quality upscales from 2560×1440. On top of that, Frame Generation can be enabled with the flick of a switch to insert a synthesised frame between two rendered. The end result, in plain English, is a framerate boost like no other.

With raytracing set to Ultra, witnessing average frames per second shift from 45 to up to 147 is the PC gaming equivalent of voodoo. Even without Super Resolution upscaling, Frame Generation alone is enough to harness a 51% boost in framerate. The literal definition of next-gen magic.

Efficiency

A less-than-5% increase in system-wide power consumption reveals RTX 4070 Super to be almost as frugal as RTX 4070 regular. Best-in-class results here.

Low power consumption and an excellent Founders Edition cooler result in comfortable in-game temperatures. Not once in many hours of testing did core temperature exceed 65°C.

There’s little in the way of noise, too. Bigger partner cards are likely to be quieter still, yet it’ll be hard to match the Founders Edition in terms of overall build quality and finesse.

Relative Performance

Evaluating relative performance across a variety of benchmarked games reveals RTX 4070 Super offers nearly 72% of RTX 4090’s flagship potential. A welcome uptick over RTX 4070 regular at 64%.

Here we divide the average framerate across games by the launch MSRP of each GPU. Nvidia’s $599 positioning affords RTX 4070 Super a top-five slot. It would have to drop to $489 to outright boss proceedings.

Dividing average framerate by system-wide, in-game power consumption highlights RTX 4070 Super as a prime pick for those keeping a close eye on the ‘leccy bill. No other card spits out this sort of performance while sipping so little power.

Overclocking

Not everyone keeps tab on electricity usage. If you’re willing to up the ante, there is some overclocking headroom available here. With the ease of an automated scanner, an overclocked curve is implemented with base and boost clocks climbing to 2,015MHz and 2,510MHz, respectively. At these settings, in-game frequency approaches 2.9GHz and the 12GB of memory is perfectly willing to run at an effective 23Gbps.

I’ll take your RTX 3090 Ti and raise you an RTX 4070 Super.

Conclusion

GeForce RTX 4070 Super feels like Nvidia’s least controversial launch in a while, and that’s a good thing. This is a solid QHD graphics card that ticks the relevant boxes without putting a foot wrong. Sure, we’d have liked 16GB of memory, and we’ve all pined for the days of x70 Series cards costing less than 500 bucks, but in 2024, we’re acutely aware those times are long gone.

Let’s see RTX 4070 Super for what it really is: the most attractive QHD graphics card on the market. In-game performance is up by 15 per cent over its predecessor, build quality remains top notch, and pricing unmoved. Add first-class raytracing and DLSS smarts and you have a competent package that will take some beating in the mid-range space.