Introduction

We have with us the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics card. NVIDIA has had a brisk start to its new generation RTX 50-series from the top, with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 in the enthusiast segment, and the more recent RTX 5070 Ti that sits in a gray area between performance and enthusiast. The new RTX 5070 is a more focused performance segment graphics card that brings you gaming at 1440p with maxed out settings, including ray tracing. The RTX 5070 comes in at a starting price of $550, which is significantly lower than the $750 that the RTX 5070 Ti starts at. The RTX 5070 gives you all the latest gaming technologies introduced with the Blackwell architecture it's based on, including Neural Rendering, ray tracing that's ready for Hyper Geometry, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation.



The new GeForce RTX 5070 debuts NVIDIA's third gaming GPU silicon from the Blackwell generation, the GB205, which it nearly maxes out. The RTX 5070 comes with 12 GB of memory across a 192-bit wide GDDR7 memory interface. While the memory size hasn't changed, there is a significant 33% increase in memory bandwidth over the RTX 4070, which should come in handy to drive some of the key features being introduced with this generation.

The GeForce Blackwell graphics architecture introduces a potentially revolutionary new technology to consumer 3D graphics, Neural Rendering. The concept taps into the incredible potential of generative AI to create photorealistic graphics. An AI model running in tandem with the graphics rendering stack creates neural objects that are combined with traditional raster 3D much like how ray traced objects are combined to it. NVIDIA even worked with Microsoft to standardize this at the API level, giving applications direct access to the Tensor cores, and for the SM-level shader execution reordering to support neural shaders. Neural Rendering capabilities are exclusive to Blackwell for now, since it relies on a specialized hardware scheduling component on the silicon, called AI Management Processor (AMP).

The new Blackwell generation CUDA core comes with generational improvements in IPC, but also concurrent FP32 and INT32 math capability on all cores in an SM. INT32 capability was only present half the cores in an SM with the previous generation Ada. The 4th Generation RT core comes with specialized hardware for even more features, including preparation for Mega Geometry, a technique with the geometry complexity of ray traced objects can be increased manyfold. The 5th generation Tensor cores come with FP4 data format support for increased throughput.

The GB205 is a lean new silicon that was given just the right specs for a product like the RTX 5070. Given the volumes of RTX 4070 NVIDIA ended up selling, the company probably realized it could do with silicon specs that are closer to those of the actual SKU specs to reduce wastage of perfectly good silicon. The GB205 physically comes with 50 streaming multiprocessors (SM) across 5 graphics processing clusters (GPCs), and the RTX 5070 nearly maxes it out by enabling 48 SM. This gives it 6,144 CUDA cores, 192 Tensor cores, 48 RT cores, and 192 TMUs. The RTX 5070 gets all 80 ROPs present on the silicon. If you recall, the previous RTX 4070 only got 64 out of the 80 ROPs on the AD104 silicon it was based on, which the RTX 4070 Ti had maxed out. There are one each of the latest NVDEC and NVENC video accelerators. The memory interface, as we mentioned, is a 192-bit wide GDDR7. Like the other chips in this generation, the RTX 5070 implements PCI-Express 5.0 x16. The GPU is clocked at speeds of up to 2512 MHz boost, while the memory ticks at 28 Gbps, yielding 672 GB/s of bandwidth. The RTX 5070 maxes out all 48 MB of L2 cache present on the silicon.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition is a slick first-party custom design by NVIDIA that's aimed to set design and performance standards for the company's board partners. It implements the same Dual Flow-Through cooler architecture as the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Founders Edition cards, but is a lot more compact, and well within NVIDIA's SFF Ready dimensions. To support its given clock speeds, the RTX 5070 comes with a total graphics power rating of 250 W, a 50 W increase over the RTX 4070. This is probably because NVIDIA is building the Blackwell generation of GPUs on the exact same NVIDIA 4N process node that the Ada generation was built on. Whatever performance per watt gains you see are purely a function of the new architecture. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition comes in at NVIDIA's starting price for the RTX 5070, of $550.