Our launch day coverage of the GeForce RTX 4070 includes: NVIDIA Founders Edition, ASUS Dual, Gainward Ghost, MSI Ventus and PNY RTX 4070. Tomorrow we'll have another round of reviews, for cards selling above the MSRP of $600.

Today NVIDIA is launching their fourth GeForce 40 Series graphics card—the GeForce RTX 4070. Just three months ago we saw the release of the $800 RTX 4070 Ti, now the green team's new card comes without the "Ti," for $200 less. Under the hood, the RTX 4070 is very similar to the RTX 4070 Ti. Both cards are based on the NVIDIA AD104 graphics processor and feature 12 GB GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit wide memory bus. Of course you're getting all of NVIDIA's GeForce 40 series goodies, like DLSS 3 Frame Generation and improved ray tracing cores. What is different is the number of cores in the GPU—the RTX 4070 has 5,888 cores, which is a pretty hefty 30% difference to the 7,680 cores on RTX 4070 Ti. Clock speeds are lower, too, the RTX 4070 Ti had a rated boost of up to 2610 MHz, whereas the non-Ti is rated for 2475 MHz.

Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite, at 1440p resolution, the new RTX 4070 is able to beat last generation's RTX 3080 by a wafer-thin margin. This puts the card 26% ahead of the GeForce RTX 3070—a relatively small gen-over-gen gain (RTX 4090: +64%, RTX 4080: +49%, RTX 4070 Ti: +44%). It is still a substantial improvement, especially when you consider other factors like DLSS 3 and efficiency. Compared to AMD's offerings, the RTX 4070 matches the Radeon RX 6800 XT almost exactly, and is 6% behind the RX 6900 XT. AMD hasn't released any Radeon RX 7000 graphics card competitive to the RTX 4070 yet, actually they haven't released any graphics card this year.

These performance numbers make GeForce RTX 4070 an excellent choice for gaming at 1440p. Even smooth 4K is in reach in most titles, especially if you're willing to enable upscaling technologies like FSR or DLSS 2, or DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Just like the RTX 4070 Ti, I've noticed that RTX 4070 does a little bit worse at 4K than at 1440p relative to our other comparison cards. It seems the smaller L2 cache and 192-bit memory bus hold those cards back a little bit.

Just like on other NVIDIA cards, ray tracing performance is better than on AMD's offerings, because NVIDIA is executing more operations in dedicated hardware, and they have had a one GPU generation head start. While the performance differences are not night-and-day, they are still noteworthy. For example, the Radeon RX 6800 XT matches the RTX 4070 in pure rasterization workloads, but falls behind by 22% with ray tracing enabled. While RX 7900 XT offered 30% higher FPS with RT off, turning RT on makes that gap shrink to just 8%. Everybody agrees that ray tracing is the future, they just disagree on how fast it will become an essential part of gaming. If you're in the "RTX on" camp, then NVIDIA's GeForce graphics cards will give you higher framerates than AMD's offerings.

Another important selling point is that NVIDIA's GeForce 40 Series graphics cards support DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult, because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. Implementing DLSS 3 is very easy for developers if they already have DLSS 2 support in their game, and NVIDIA is offering a lot of support to developers for integrating these technologies. Another interesting NVIDIA tech is Reflex, which reduces the total gaming latency (which NVIDIA likes to call whole system latency), so you see things earlier on your screen and can react faster, to get more kills or survive for longer.

Leading up to this launch, I've noticed a lot of discussion around the 12 GB VRAM size of RTX 4070. While I agree that 16 GB would be better, I disagree with people who say that 12 GB is already too small, or obsolete. There are a few (badly coded) games out there that use a ton of VRAM, especially at 4K, but the vast majority of titles won't even get close to such VRAM usage numbers. In our whole test suite not a single game saw a meaningful performance hit with 12 GB, not even at 4K—and RTX 4070 is fundamentally a 1440p card. You'll also have to consider that making a 16 GB card isn't just "let's add another 4 GB memory chip," but you also need to put additional signal traces on the PCB, and widen the memory controller inside the GPU, so that it can talk to all these chips in parallel. I don't think anyone would be willing to pay $700 for a 16 GB RTX 4070, would you? On the other hand, AMD does offer 16 GB VRAM on the Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT, which could make them an option for those who want to focus on VRAM future-proofing.

It's good to see a Founders Edition card for the RTX 4070—there wasn't one for the RTX 4070 Ti. NVIDIA engineered a fantastic board that feels surprisingly compact and light-weight, especially after having reviewed all those huge RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 cards. With just two slots and 24 cm length, the card will fit into virtually every case—an important capability for people upgrading their systems. Temperatures of the card are very good, slightly below 70°C, and memory isn't really warm either at 72°C. Noise levels are good too, with 32.5 dBA. While the card is not "whisper quiet" it is "quiet enough" to not be distracting in any gaming PC. Should you want less noise, then check out one of the many custom designs that we've reviewed today, and the more premium models (reviews tomorrow) will be even quieter. Our apples-to-apples cooler test confirms that the thermal solution isn't that powerful, but it's perfectly sufficient for the heat output of the RTX 4070. As expected, custom designs from other vendors offer bigger and better coolers, even at MSRP pricing. For example, the MSI Ventus 3X is $600, too, but runs almost 10°C lower at the same power and noise levels.

Being able to run at these speeds with such a small cooling solution is an amazing feat, thanks to the stunning energy efficiency of NVIDIA's Ada architecture. With just 200 W, the power supply requirements are minimal, any beige OEM PSU will be able to drive the RTX 4070 just fine, so upgraders can just plop in a new graphics card and they're good to go. Performance per Watt is among the best we've ever seen, slightly better than RTX 4070 Ti and Radeon RX 7900 XTX; only the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are even more energy-efficient.

NVIDIA has set a base price of $600 for the GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition, which is an alright price given the current GPU pricing landscape, but $100 more expensive than the launch-price of RTX 3070 and RTX 2070. At that price point the card is clearly the best option, even though it's not standing out spectacularly, like it would had it been $500 instead. There's no way I'd buy RTX 3080 10 GB for $550 if I can get the RTX 4070 for $600. The selling points here are DLSS 3 and energy efficiency. Strong competition comes from the RX 6800 XT at $510. It offers a larger framebuffer of 16 GB and similar rasterization performance, but slower ray tracing and worse efficiency. Spending $200 more for an $800 RTX 4070 Ti is out of reach for people shopping with a $600 budget, just like Radeon RX 7900 XT.

NVIDIA knows these numbers, too, and that's exactly why the RTX 4070 is positioned like that. It's the best choice in its segment no doubt, with good performance and impressive efficiency, but I wonder if that is enough to get people excited for PC gaming. Graphics cards have become extremely expensive in the last years, and people are frustrated, and looking elsewhere. Consider $500 will buy you a PlayStation 5, a complete gaming system that's ready to go, which will run 4K and has every single game hand-optimized for the platform, without any compatibility issues, shader compilation stutter, or other hoops to jump through.