It’s available April 13th
Memory in the RTX 4070 Ti and XTX: Importance of More RAM on the GPUs and the Founders Edition
After a swift rebrand to the RTX 4070 Ti without a Founder Edition, in order to put pressure on board partners to stick with its $599 retail price, nVidia is now ready to offer its own Founders Edition.
It is good that Nvidia increased the VRAM to 12 months, but they could have gone further and put more in games that are currently eating up large amounts of memory. Prior to the Nvidia announcement, AMD published a brief explanation of why more memory is important on the GPUs. It’s important to point out that in the past two years, it has shipped the RX 6800 with 16 gigabytes of VRAM along with a pair of other notebooks with 16 gigabytes. The new flagships of the company, the XTX and XXT, come with 24 and 20 gigabytes of memory, respectively.
One of the benefits of the new AI frame generation technology is that it can be used to generate two frames with existing rendering techniques, while a third frame is inserted between them. It is a big boost to frame rates, which are essential for ray tracing and improvement of path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077.
Eighty three percent of owners of the 40 series of Turing cards turn on ray tracing in games, according to the company. More than 70% of the time, the owners of the 30 and 20-series games turn on the card-based card game, while less than half do.
It seems like this is a 1440p card due to the fact that it isn’t as impressive as the RTX 4070 in 4K. I put the GPU in a monitor with a 31.5-inch screen. This monitor supports refresh rates up to 144Hz, but the RTX 4070 didn’t come close to making use of that refresh rate even with the help of DLSS.
The RTX 4070 is one of the few cards in the series that uses a single 12-pin PCIe 5 connection. You can connect two power cables with the 12VHPWR adapter cable in the box. I still don’t like the power adapter, but I recommend buying a single cable solution from a third party.
The RTX 4070 delivers impressive gains over the RTX 3080 in titles like Forza Horizon 5 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla but loses out in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Nvidia was able to reproduce the dips in performance for CS:GO in my previous RTX 4070 Ti review, so there must be some kind of bug affecting RTX 40-series cards in the benchmark that we use.
I tested the RTX 4070 with a 32-inch Odyssey G7 monitor. This monitor supports fast refresh rates of up to 250Hz and G-sync technology.
In the Cyberpunk 2078 Overdrive Mode test the RTX 4070 did not fare well. It’s a super demanding new technical test and it only runs at 8fps without DLSS on the RTX 4070 at 4K. Once again we see performance more than triple thanks to DLSS 3, but that’s only getting things up to 25fps so you’ll definitely want to play around with lowering settings or DLSS performance modes to improve the frame rates at 4K here.
I would be tempted to wait and see what the chipmaker can offer at this price point. We have already seen two RDNA GPUs from the maker of the chip, which are capable of higher levels of performance at lower prices. Many are hoping that it will be able to match the performance of Nvidia at the Turing level, even though it won’t be able to do it at the top end.
