The green team is going to make a lot of money with the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti card. First and foremost, it is a graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of competing with or exceeding the RTX 3090 (opens in a new tab) in terms of gaming performance and frequently exceeding the more expensive AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards. Importantly, it is also a piece of Ada GPU silicon that costs a whopping $799, despite being only slightly larger than the chip in the RTX 3050.
Nvidia should be able to produce a GPU with such a low die area and price that it will offer high margins to please shareholders and Jen-Hsun alike.
Thus, high margins and high performance; the ultimate goal for any manufacturer of graphics cards. In addition, you can use exaggerated performance marketing numbers while still being able to back them up with actual benchmark data when you combine the two benefits of DLSS 3 with its dark magic Frame Generation technology.
Additionally, it is a card that exemplifies something brand-new from Nvidia: a willingness to admit error. Before Nvidia debuted this card (opens in new tab), it was known as the RTX 4080 12GB. At that time, it had already been manufactured and was awaiting shipment in partners’ warehouses. After it had already been announced and the industry had exaggerated a collective spit-take, Team Green realized it was confusing to have two very different GPUs under the same name.
The Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, also known as the RTX 4080 12GB, has been rebranded, and now it is finally in our test rig. It has the same features as before, but it costs $100 less. We used an MSRP-level Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC(opens in new tab) card for our evaluation of the most recent Nvidia GPU because there is no Founders Edition for the RTX 4070 Ti.
How good is the RTX 4070 Ti?
The RTX 4080 12GB’s demise, rebranding, and new price were the best things that ever happened to this third-tier Ada GPU. This card, now and forever known as the RTX 4070 Ti, makes it impossible to recommend AMD’s RX 7900 XT(opens in new tab), making that expensive RDNA 3 offering even less appealing.
It would have received a lot of criticism if it had launched before AMD’s first chiplet GPUs for the same price as the RTX 4080 12GB; however, it is now cheaper and nearly as efficient. and sometimes even more so.
The RTX 4080 16GB (opens in new tab) card, which costs more than $1,200, has also been negatively impacted in the same way. It is, on average, 21 percent slower at 4K and much closer at 1440p, but it costs at least 33 percent less. When you have either a much more powerful card in the RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) or a much cheaper one now in the RTX 4070 Ti bookending it, I don’t understand how you would advise someone to spend the amount of money that retailers are asking for the RTX 4080.
I really think that AMD and Nvidia’s unappreciated cards should see their prices drop sooner rather than later. Thanks to the new GeForce Now Ultimate tier (opens in new tab), the green team has at least found another use for the unwanted RTX 4080 silicon.
In terms of gaming, the RTX 4070 Ti’s 4K performance is impressive even without upscaling, and rather remarkable with it. However, the 1440p performance is where it really shines, particularly in comparison to the other GPUs in its vicinity. It can even achieve higher frame rates than AMD’s top-tier RDNA 3 GPU at 1440p, despite the fact that the Radeons’ additional 20GB and 24GB memory pools are ineffective.
Given that it costs $100 more, I might have hoped for a bigger performance boost over the RTX 3080 (opens in new tab), the card it really replaces in the Ampere stack. The retrograde comparative specs list is also disappointing—something that bothered us when it was first introduced as the RTX 4080 12GB (opens in new tab)—and it really feels like the 192-bit memory configuration is like Scrooge.
Even so, the RTX 4070 Ti’s performance levels are hard to ignore, even when DLSS and Frame Generation are taken into account. At that time last year, that was a massive GPU; now, we have a card that is almost half the price and basically has the same gaming capabilities.
With the exception of the RTX 4090, this is the graphics card I’d choose over the rest, given the current state of the market.
