Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard SOC is the company's fastest and most premium custom design product based on the RTX 5070 Ti. Unlike with the RTX 40-series, there is no SUPRIM series product for the 70 Ti segment, which is a good way to understand MSI's strategy here. The Vanguard brand of graphics card is being introduced with this generation. It incorporates almost all cooling innovations of the SUPRIM, but with more sporty product styling that's designed to look a step up from the Gaming Trio. In a way the Vanguard series is what the Gaming Z series from MSI used to be, a few generations ago. The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is an upper performance segment graphics card that's on the edge of its segment, teetering on the enthusiast segment. It comes with a starting price of $750, but we know of many custom design cards that are nearing the $1,000-mark, so you might as well consider this enthusiast-class, that is until you see what NVIDIA recommends the RTX 5070 Ti for.



NVIDIA does not explicitly recommend the RTX 5070 Ti as a 4K Ultra HD-class GPU, but something that's designed to more than max out 1440p, perhaps even 21:9 ultrawides, or 1440p high refresh-rate use-cases; although we've known past generations of NVIDIA GPUs in this segment to be fairly capable of 4K Ultra HD gaming, if you can tone down the settings a bit, or use DLSS. The new DLSS 4 technology being introduced with the Blackwell graphics architecture the RTX 5070 Ti is based on, incorporates new Transformer-based AI models that improve image quality at every performance preset of DLSS super resolution, besides the quality of ray-reconstruction and frame generation. Blackwell introduces the exclusive Multi Frame Generation that lets the GPU generate up to 3 frames completely using AI, succeeding a conventionally rendered one, nearly quadrupling framerates.

The new Blackwell graphics architecture debuts Neural Rendering a breakthrough new technology that lets generative AI model participate in the core graphics rendering stack, creating objects, textures, and other elements using AI, incorporating it with conventional raster 3D graphics, much in the same way RTX blends ray traced objects with it. This is only possible on Blackwell because of a new hardware scheduling component called the AI Management Processor (AMP), and the significant increases in memory bandwidth that allow the GPU to run AI models and render graphics in tandem. NVIDIA even worked with Microsoft to standardize the technology at the DirectX API level, letting applications directly access the Tensor cores.

The new Blackwell streaming multiprocessor (SM) features concurrent FP32 and INT32 math capability on all its CUDA cores. The older Ada Lovelace SM only has INT32 capability on half its cores. The shader execution reordering engine is now aware of neural shaders and neural objects, which it can allocate to the Tensor cores. The new 5th Gen Tensor core comes with FP4 data format capability to increase throughput by trading in precision. The 4th Gen RT core comes with even more specialized hardware, including components that enable Mega Geometry, or the ability for ray traced objects to have exponentially higher triangle counts (and the need for rays to interact with all of those triangles).

The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is based on the same GB203 silicon as the RTX 5080, which it is cut down from, by enabling 70 out of 84 SM present on the silicon. This works out to 8,960 CUDA cores, 280 Tensor cores, 70 RT cores, 280 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The ROP count is lowered as NVIDIA disabled an entire GPC to achieve the desired SM count. The L2 cache has been lowered, too, down to 48 MB from the 64 MB. The memory sub-system is almost unchanged from the RTX 5080, but is a massive upgrade over the previous generation RTX 4070 Ti. You now get 16 GB of faster 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, compared to the 12 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X over 192-bit, of the RTX 4070 Ti. This works out to 896 GB/s of memory bandwidth, or a massive 77% increase.

The MSI RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard SOC comes with a slick, premium version of the Tri Frozr cooling solution, which is noticeably heavier than the one the company's RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio OC+ comes with (which we also reviewed today). The Vanguard SOC comes with a heavier heatsink that uses a vapor chamber plate, eight heatpipes, and a slightly thicker fin-stack. The StormForce fans are similar to the ones on the Gaming Trio OC+. The cooler shroud and backplate are made of more premium brushed metal 2-tone surfaces. The RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard SOC offers the company's highest factory overclock, with 2588 MHz boost on tap compared to the 2452 MHz reference. We expect the MSI RTX 5070 Ti SOC to be priced at $1000, a 33% premium over the NVIDIA baseline price.