Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Eagle review: 1440p light-chasing game breaks 120 frames and is a cost-effective mid-to-high-end graphics card

After being canceled and renamed, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is re-launched at a more competitive price of US$ 799, let’s take a look at its actual performance!

GeForce RTX 4070 Ti specifications

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti of the Ada Lovelace architecture uses the TSMC N4 (TSMC 4nm) process, a nearly complete version of the AD104-400 chip (the same number of SMs, only a few less encoders and decoders). The chip has 60 groups of SMs, contains 7680 CUDA Cores, is equipped with 192-bit, 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory, and consumes 285W for the whole card.

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Eagle appearance and design

The sample we obtained this time is a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Eagle produced by Gigabyte. The clock setting of this graphics card is exactly the same as the official NVIDIA preset value, without any overclocking measures, which is equivalent to the recommended starting price of the product.

The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Eagle adopts a three-slot thick three-fan design. The main component of the cooling module is the vapor chamber, which is equipped with 6 nickel-free copper heat pipes to transfer heat to a larger number of aluminum fins.

Although NVIDIA’s graphics card below GeForce RTX 4070 Ti has opened to use 2 sets of PCIe 8 pin power supply input, but this card still uses the 12VHPWR terminal. Since it is a non-overclocking version, the included adapter cable only needs to be connected to 2 sets of PCIe 8 pins.

The length of the PCB actually only accounts for about 60% of the total length of the card, and the remaining space is opened in the form of a large window on the back panel, allowing the airflow to pass through the cooling fins and promote the ventilation of the case.

This card should also have an overclocking version, so GIGABYTE has left a BIOS overclocking switch on the upper edge of the graphics card, and friends who don’t want to overclock can switch to silent mode.

Test environment and platform

For the next test, we found the former flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founding Edition with 12GB of VRAM and the original price of US$ 1199, and the rival AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT with the closest price (US$ 899) as a comparison. Let’s take a look at the performance of GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K (Re-size BAR On)
motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero
Memory	Kingston FURY Beast DDR5-6000 16GBx2
heat sink	ASUS ROG Strix LC II 360 ARGB White Edition
heat transfer medium	Thermalright TF8
graphics card	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
store	Kingston FURY Renegade SSD 2TB Seagate FireCuda 530 NVMe SSD 2TB
power supply	FSP Hydro PTM PRO ATX 3.0 (PCIe 5.0) 1200W
working system	Windows 11 Professional 21H2

3DMark

In the Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme tests that simulate DirectX 12 games, the graphics scores of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti increased by 17% and 10.5% respectively over the RTX 3080 Ti, but fell behind the Radeon RX 7900 XT by about 9%.

The Speed ​​Way test that simulates the DirectX 12 Ultimate game incorporates ray tracing, and the RTX 4070 Ti is about 3% higher than the RTX 3080 Ti, and it is also nearly 9% ahead of the RX 7900 XT. However, the performance of Port Royal is slightly different. The RTX 4070 Ti has grown by 7.5% compared to the RTX 3080 Ti, but it is only about 4.4% ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 XT.

In the DXR test that simply calculates ray tracing performance, the RTX 4070 Ti leads the RTX 3080 Ti and RX 7900 XT by 27% and 37%, respectively, with its more advanced RT Core.

Finally, I saw the DLSS test. Since the RTX 4070 Ti exclusively supports DLSS 3, the quality and performance modes are about 47% and 43% higher than the RTX 3080 Ti, respectively.

legacy rasterized games

In the game environment without ray tracing, the 4K UHD 2160p resolution of the RTX 4070 Ti increased by an average of 6% compared with the RTX 3080 Ti, with the largest increase of 26.7% in “God of War” and “Forza Horizon 5”. (Forza Horizon 5) also had 17.7%.

It is worth noting that the memory interface of the RTX 4070 Ti is only 192-bit, and the total bandwidth is only about half of that of the RTX 3080 Ti, so the performance of some 4K games will be slightly lower. Compared with the RX 7900 XT, the overall FPS is about 4.5% behind on average

However, when it comes to WQHD 1440p resolution, because it is less likely to encounter the situation of limited memory bandwidth, the RTX 4070 Ti can lead the RTX 3080 Ti by 10.6% on average. Dying Light 2 Stay Human also leads by 19.4%, but overall it is still about 1.7% behind RX 7900 XT.

Finally, seeing the Full HD 1080p resolution, the RTX 4070 Ti has a slightly better performance thanks to a higher operating clock. On average, it is 11.6% higher than RTX 3080 Ti, and slightly behind RX 7900 XT by about 1.3%.

ray tracing games

Ray tracing games are the strengths of RTX 4070 Ti. 4K UHD 2160p resolution leads RTX 3080 Ti and RX 7900 XT by 12.5% ​​and 17.8%, respectively, and WQHD 1440p resolution further increases to 14.6% and 18.6%.

DLSS games

With more powerful Tensor computing power, RTX 4070 Ti’s 4K UHD 2160p resolution performance has increased by an average of 23.6% compared with RTX 3080 Ti, and WQHD 1440p resolution has further evolved to 35.5%.

In games that support DLSS 3, the RTX 4070 Ti can even achieve about 1.5 times the frame rate of the RTX 3080 Ti at WQHD 1440p resolution, especially “Cyberpunk 2077” (Cyberpunk 2077), which even reaches an astonishing 1.7 times.

Power Consumption vs. Temperature

Power consumption can be said to be the highlight of the RTX 4070 Ti. The burn-in power consumption reported by the software is only 271.6 W, which is far lower than the 350 W of the RTX 3080 Ti and the 339 W of the RX 7900 XT. If measured through the power contacts, the RTX 4070 Ti’s instantaneous maximum load is only 304 W, which is also far lower than the 392 W of the RTX 3080 Ti and the 361 W of the RX 7900 XT.

In terms of temperature, because GIGABYTE’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Eagle uses a three-slot, three-fan radiator, coupled with lower power consumption, the temperature performance is naturally higher than that of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founder’s Edition with two slots and two fans and the Radeon RX with two slots and three fans. The 7900 XT both come low.

What’s more worth mentioning is that the maximum temperature of the memory is only 70°C, which shows that GIGABYTE’s heat dissipation of the memory is carefully designed.

Summarize

Although the performance of GeForce RTX 4070 Ti in 4K UHD 2160p games is slightly limited by the memory bandwidth, WQHD 1440p is indeed quite impressive. The performance of rasterized games has increased by more than 10% compared with the previous generation flagship RTX 3080 Ti, and the average frame rate Nearly 170 fps. The performance growth rate of ray tracing games is even closer to 15%. If DLSS 3 is added, the average frame rate is even close to 150 fps.

Based on the suggested price of US$ 799, the price/performance ratio of RTX 4070 Ti is significantly better than RTX 4080, and slightly better than Radeon RX 7900 XT. If your game environment is still stuck at 1440p resolution, RTX 4070 Ti can indeed give a very good experience. When DLSS 3 becomes more popular, its advantages will be further expanded.