Positioning & Technology
NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 4070 Super as part of their GeForce RTX 40 Super refresh, which was first announced in January at CES, Las Vegas. We've exhaustively reviewed all the new cards. Today we're testing the Galax GeForce RTX 4070 Super EX, which is a factory overclocked model with a premium cooling solution. After reviewing all the three new Supers, it turns out that RTX 4070 Super is the most interesting addition, because it offers significant improvements over the non-Super model—more than RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super. RTX 4070 Super is built using the same AD104 GPU that's powering the RTX 4070, the memory configuration is identical, too, just like the technological features. What has been improved is the number of GPU cores available—RTX 4070 non-Super has 5888 cores, the Super has 7168, a +21% increase. The number of ROPs is increased by 16, from 64 to 80. This brings the card very close to RTX 4070 Ti, which has 7680 cores (+7%) and the same amount of ROPs, with 12 GB VRAM on a 192-bit bus, too. The L2 cache size on RTX 4070 Super matches the RTX 4070 Ti, both cards have 48 MB.

Performance
Galax is including a small factory OC on their card, to a rated boost of 2565 MHz, which is +90 MHz or a 3.6% increase over the NVIDIA baseline frequency of 2475 MHz. Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite, at 1440p, we find the Galax RTX 4070 Super EX 16% faster than the RTX 4070 non-Super, which is a pretty substantial improvement for a refresh—unlike GeForce RTX 4080 Super, which only got approximately +1%. This means that the card is able to match last generation's RTX 3090 flagship, the gap to RTX 4070 Ti shrinks to just 7%, and the RTX 4070 Ti Super is only 13% faster, while costing $200 more. While AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT was a bit faster than RTX 4070 in pure raster scenarios, this has changed with the RTX 4070 Super, which is now 9% faster—an important goal that NVIDIA achieved successfully. Just a few weeks ago, AMD fought back with the global release of the China-only RX 7900 GRE. The red team's newest model offers slightly better raster performance, and has a 16 GB framebuffer, but still falls behind in ray tracing scenarios. The gap to RTX 4080 is still pretty big with +33%, likely the reason why NVIDIA has launched the RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super, to cover strategically important points in that segment.

DLSS, FSR & Frame Generation
With these performance numbers RTX 4070 Super is a perfect match for 1440p with maximum settings. You should be able to enable ray tracing in most titles, too. Thanks to modern upscalers, even 4K at solid framerates is in reach with the card. Just like the other GeForce 40 cards, RTX 4070 Super has support for all of NVIDIA's DLSS technologies: NVIDIA DLSS 2 upscaling, DLSS 3 frame generation and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. On top of that you can enable AMD FSR 2 and FSR 3 in games, because those technologies work on all GPUs from all vendors. Basically this means that you'll be covered in terms of upscaling and frame generation. While DLSS 3 is definitely the leading solution right now, with the best game support, AMD is pushing hard and their frame generation solution will come to several major titles in 2024. From a technology perspective, DLSS 3 is superior, because it uses the optical flow hardware unit in Ada GPUs, and NVIDIA Reflex will help bring down the input latency.

Ray Tracing & VRAM
As expected, ray tracing works very well on the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, clearly offering a superior experience than what Radeon RX 7800 XT, RX 7900 GRE and even RX 7900 XT, can achieve. Just like in rasterization, the performance scaling at higher resolutions falls behind a bit, because the card is a bit constrained in its memory config. Especially at 4K, the L2 cache tends to be a bit too small, which means there will be more memory transfers, which have to go over the fairly narrow 192-bit memory bus. As a result, performance doesn't scale as well as some other cards with a more powerful memory configuration. While I would have loved to see more than 12 GB VRAM on the RTX 4070 Super, this isn't possible with the AD104 GPU, considering the 192-bit memory interface, which limits the memory configurations to 12 GB or 24 GB. 24 GB is definitely overkill for this segment and doesn't really translate into enough performance to justify the higher cost. Looking at our test results, the 12 GB VRAM config is perfectly sufficient for all games except Alan Wake 2 RT in 4K, which runs at sub-30 FPS, even with more memory. This means that you'll have to turn on DLSS upscaling either way, which lowers the game's render resolution and the VRAM requirements accordingly. If you want to be future-proof, then consider the RTX 4070 Ti Super, which comes with 16 GB VRAM—exactly for those scenarios. AMD RX 7800 XT also has 16 GB VRAM, but in most games it still loses to the 12 GB 4070 Super. AMD's newest card, the RX 7900 GRE offers 16 GB, too, but can't fundamentally improve the gaming experience over the RTX 4070 Super, despite the bigger VRAM size, and especially not at ray tracing.

GPU Compute
We've recently added a section focused on testing GPU Compute, which is becoming more and more important every day. Emerging AI Technologies like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and others are transforming the world. While the use of compute on the consumer desktop is limited today, it will grow considerably. For our first round of testing we've picked three real-life workloads that allow us to get a feel what to expect. Here, NVIDIA is the clear leader with a substantial advantage over both AMD and Intel. It's not only about performance, but also about the software ecosystem, which is much more advanced on the NV side, but the other players are working hard to catch up, I'm sure.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
The Galax RTX 4070 Super EX looks great with its mostly-black color theme and will integrate nicely into any build, no matter the color. You also get adjustable RGB lighting effects that look even better, thanks to the semi-transparent fan blades that light up with RGB bling. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test results show that the thermal solution on the Galax EX is quite powerful, much stronger than what is offered on the near-MSRP cards. Compared to the Founders Edition, the card runs 6°C cooler and a little bit quieter—both at the same time. Compared to other cards, temperatures are a bit better, but noise is a little bit higher. It seems that Galax wanted to focus more on lower temperatures instead of low noise, and went a bit off-balance here. Personally I prefer the opposite because past a certain point, lower temperatures make no significant difference in anything, other than the number in monitoring software, but lower noise levels are noticeable all the time during gaming. With 33 dBA the card isn't "loud" in any way, but its fans are definitely more noticeable than some other cards, which reach much lower noise levels. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2024, the fans will stop spinning when not gaming, for the perfect noise-free experience.

Power Consumption
Power efficiency of the RTX 4070 Super is slightly improved over the RTX 4070 non-Super, probably because some of the disabled units can't be power-gated completely on the latter, which means they don't contribute to performance, but still consume power. With just 230 W during gaming, the Galax RTX 4070 Super is highly efficient, especially when considering the performance offered. Radeon RX 7800 XT does consume a little bit more power (250 W) and the RX 7900 GRE is slightly more power-hungry still (265 W), but at the end of the day, the differences are marginal for all considerations of PSU capacity planning and your power bill. While there is still some controversy around the 16-pin power connector, all RTX 4070 Super cards come with it, and I'm a big fan, even though I'm not sure if the location in the middle of the card is the best possible choice.

Overclocking
There is not much to report on overclocking, other than it works, is easy to do and will yield you around 6 to 7%, which is the typical range that we've been seeing from most cards in recent years. While the RTX 4070 Super FE offers a maximum power limit adjustment range of 240 W, the Galax Super EX blocks manual power limit increases completely, the default setting of 220 W is the highest option available, no idea why—the card's 8+2-phase VRM design definitely seems powerful enough. This is not a huge deal, but you'll lose around 4% in potential performance after manual OC, compared to other cards that give you higher power limit settings.

Pricing & Alternatives
Currently, the cheapest RTX 4070 Super is the Zotac Twin Edge, which sells for $10 below the official $700 MSRP. The Galax RTX 4070 Super EX will sell for a bit above MSRP due to the premium design with improved cooler and ARGB, around $615 is expected. At that price point the card is a compelling alternative to the various big brand custom designs, which are all more expensive. No doubt, NVIDIA's RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition is one of the best-looking cards in this segment, but its cooler is rather weak and a bit on the loud side—I could definitely see myself spending another $15 to fix that. The Zotac Twin Edge for $590 is certainly tempting, but it comes with a much weaker dual-slot, dual-fan cooler that will run louder, too. The cheapest RTX 4070 non-Super is currently $525, I suspect that in the coming weeks and months it will drop even closer to $500. It has to, because AMD's RX 7800 XT is $490 now, offering a strong alternative to both the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070S, especially if you don't care about ray tracing. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE is available for $550, which is another interesting option if you want to save money. You will have to live with lower RT performance and lack of DLSS 2 / DLSS 3 Frame Generation—a reasonable tradeoff for many, but a dealbreaker for others. DLSS 3 is the green team's biggest selling point for GeForce 40. Last-generation cards really aren't that interesting, unless they come at extremely attractive price points. There's no way people should buy a RX 6900 XT, RX 6950 XT or RTX 3090 instead of 4070 Super, just to save a few dollars. I guess some DLSS 3 naysayers could be tempted by a used sub-$500 RTX 3080 10 GB, but besides that, the only real competition is the RX 7800 XT, RX 7900 GRE and NVIDIA's own GeForce 40 cards.