Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition Review: 1440p 100 fps gaming for $100 markup over Radeon RX 7800 XT

Note: This is an ongoing review. Thermals, stress tests, and noise measurements are currently underway. During CES 2024, Nvidia announced Super versions of some of its current GPUs including the GeForce RTX 4070 Super , RTX 4070 Ti Super , and the RTX 4080 Super .

We now have with us the RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition (FE) for review. The RTX 4070 Super technically supplants the current RTX 4070 lineup for the same MSRP of US$599. For the price, you get a ~21% increase in CUDA core counts over the regular RTX 4070 along with corresponding increases in Tensor and ray tracing (RT) cores.

The regular RTX 4070 will continue to be available at a discounted US$549. Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that the RTX 4070 Super utilizes only 56 shaders (7,168 CUDA cores) out of 60 (7,680 CUDA cores) in AD104. Therefore, the forthcoming RTX 4070 Ti Super is being moved to the AD103 GPU due to the complete saturation of the AD104 by the RTX 4070 Ti .

According to Nvidia, these improvements should result in 35. 5 shader TFLOPs, 568 AI TOPS with the Tensor cores (with sparsity) and 82 RT TFLOPS. While the increase in shader counts is welcome, the RTX 4070 Super essentially uses the same 192-bit 504 GB/s 12 GB GDDR6X VRAM as the RTX 4070.

This shouldn’t be much of a problem for 1080p Ultra and 1440p Ultra, but 4K Ultra gaming can potentially run into memory bottlenecks. That being said, Nvidia has also augmented the L2 cache from 36 MB in the original RTX 4070 to 48 MB in the new RTX 4070 Super, which should provide some reprieve in VRAM-heavy situations. The RTX 4070 Super FE retails for ₹63,000 in India, which is a marginal increase over the RTX 4070 launch price.

The card is backed by a three-year manufacturer warranty. In this review, we take the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition for a spin and how well these improvements translate into real-world gains over the RTX 4070 and other competing GPUs. Like all Founders Edition cards, the RTX 4070 Super FE looks quite unassuming with no fancy bling.

Nvidia has given a matte texture to the faceplate with an embossed “SUPER” logo, which lends it a premium, understated elegance. At just about 24 cm width, the RTX 4070 Super FE is a compact dual-slot card that will find itself at home even in compact cases. The overall construction quality leaves no room for concern.

Nvidia employs the tried and tested thermal subsystem found in the other RTX 40 series FE cards. With one fan acting as intake and the other as exhaust, this particularly bodes well for cases with top-mounted radiator fans in a “pull” configuration. The card offers the familiar connectors — 3x DisplayPort 1.

4-out and 1x HDMI 2. 1a-out. A 12VHPWR connector supplies power.

While ATX 3. x power supplies are recommended, Nvidia includes a handy 2x 8-pin to 12VHPWR adapter in the box. The RTX 4070 Super FE runs at a reference boost of 2,475 MHz.

The card has a 220 W TGP, which is 20 W higher than the reference spec for the RTX 4070. The power target by can be increased by 9% to get a 240 W TGP. Our test bench is based on the Intel Z790 platform and uses the Core i9-13900K as the processor of choice.

Specifications include: We would like to thank Cooler Master for supplying the test bench and PSU, Gigabyte for the motherboard, CPU, SSD, AiO cooler, and monitor, and Kingston for the memory. In cumulative synthetic benchmarks, the RTX 4070 Super FE affords a decent 13% improvement over the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 AMP Airo and ties with average RTX 3090 values while the RTX 4070 Ti average leads by 9%. That being said, the leads over the RTX 4070 AMP Airo can be as high as 23% in individual tests such as Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme.

The RTX 4070 Super FE also shows good leads over the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (+26%) and the RX 7800 XT (+8%). The RTX 4060 Ti 8G average with its anemic memory and shader configuration trails by 33%. Compared to the RTX 4090 FE , the RTX 4070 Super FE trails by 38% in overall synthetic tests.

We observe a 19% performance increase between the RTX 4070 AMP Airo and the RTX 4070 Super FE in V-Ray 5 CUDA, consistent with the increased CUDA core counts. The RTX 4070 Super FE’s performance is comparable to that of the RTX 3090 Ti in this test. AMD cards understandably lag behind owing to architecture differences.

That being said, the RTX 4070 Super FE manages an impressive 53% lead over the Radeon RX 7800 XT in the V-Ray 5 RTX benchmark. Nvidia’s latest Super card takes 17% lesser time to complete a Blender CUDA render compared to the RTX 4070 AMP Airo and is comparable to the RTX 4080 FE and RTX 4090 FE in Optix rendering. While LuxMark Room shows a huge 60% lead over even the Radeon RX 7900 XTX , AMD cards take centerstage in LuxMark Sala.

The gains in synthetics do not fully reflect in gaming tests. Overall gaming performance of the RTX 4070 Super at Ultra settings is only about 9% higher than the RTX 4070 AMP Airo while it can be up to 13% in individual titles, particularly at 1440p and 4K. The RTX 4070 Super trails by 37% and 27% when compared to the RTX 4090 FE and RTX 4080 FE, respectively in cumulative gaming performance.

The RTX 4070 Ti average is about 13% faster. Nevertheless, the RTX 4070 Super more or less closes the gap with the RTX 3090 average — a card that once retailed for US$1,499. The increase in shader counts also helps the RTX 4070 Super to place itself comfortably ahead of the Radeon RX 6950 XT while being up to 8% faster than the RX 7800 XT.

Overall, the RTX 4070 Super breaks no sweat in achieving 100+ fps in native 1440p Ultra, save for particularly demanding titles such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora , Alan Wake 2 , and F1 23 . The card is also quite capable of achieving 60 fps at native 4K Ultra in the vast majority of tested games. A helping hand from upscalers is in order, however, especially with ray tracing enabled.

Ray tracing performance also gets some much-needed impetus over the RTX 4070 AMP Airo with up to 31% gains in Cyberpunk 2077 1. 6 at 4K Ultra. The actual gameplay at these settings is barely better than a slideshow, though.

That being said, ray tracing performance at 1080p Ultra can show up to 19% benefits in Dying Light 2 and up to 17% in Watch Dogs: Legion . Interestingly, we see a 6% uptick in 1080p ray tracing in The Callisto Protocol vis-à-vis the RTX 4070 Ti average. Overall, the RTX 4070 Super’s ray tracing capabilities are comparable to those of the RX 7900 XT and, at times, even to that of the RX 7900 XTX as seen in the case of Ghostwire: Tokyo .

Compared to the RTX 4070 AMP Airo, the RTX 4070 FE only has a 7% higher power draw at a 100% power target (PT) while being 18% more economical than the RTX 4070 Ti in FurMark at 1280 x 720 resolution with no AA. Similar to other Ada Lovelace cards, the RTX 4070 Super does not actually consume higher power while gaming even though it is set at a 109% PT. In terms of power efficiency, the RTX 4070 Super is about 14% more efficient in The Witcher 3 at 1080p Ultra compared to the RX 7800 XT and about 8% better than the RTX 4070 AMP Airo while trailing the RTX 4090 FE by just 5%.

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