NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 launched in January this year, just six weeks ago. In these six weeks we've upgraded our GPU test system to Intel Core i9-13900K with EVGA Z790 DARK, fast DDR5 memory and Seasonic's new Vertex 16-pin ATX 3.0 PSU. We've also made the switch to Windows 11, added several new games and added reporting for minimum FPS (one percent lows) to our data processing pipeline.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti started life as the GeForce RTX 4080 12 GB, and was announced at the same time as the RTX 4080 16 GB. Immediately, tech enthusiasts all over the world cried out because these two RTX "4080" cards were based on completely different hardware configurations. The RTX 4080 16 GB was built around the AD103 GPU with a 256-bit wide memory interface, and the RTX 4080 12 GB used AD104 with 192-bit memory instead. After weeks of public drama, NVIDIA finally gave in and "unlaunched" the RTX 4080 12 GB and renamed it to "RTX 4070 Ti." Besides the name there is no difference, you're still getting AD103, with 7680 GPU cores, 12 GB GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus and 60 RT cores, just with a name that's not as confusing to less informed buyers.

Zotac's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti AMP Extreme Airo is the company's flagship RTX 4070 Ti, coming with the highest clock frequencies that they offer. While the NVIDIA reference clock speeds are set to 2610 MHz Boost, Zotac allows up to 2700 MHz on the AMP Extreme, or +3.4%. Compared to other vendors, this clock frequency is roughly in the middle of all the offerings. The top cards reach 2790 MHz, another 3.3% increase. Overall, compared against a RTX 4070 Ti at reference speeds and power limit, the Zotac card achieves a 2% performance uplift at 1440p and 4K. This means that performance is virtually identical to last generation's RTX 3090 Ti flagship card—a big achievement. Compared to the RTX 3070 Ti, the FPS increase is 47% gen-over-gen. AMD has released their new Radeons last year, the Radeon RX 7900 XT is 6% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti, and the RX 7900 XTX is 20% faster. This is with ray tracing turned off, at 1440p. For the RTX 4070 Ti, 1440p is the ideal resolution, not 4K.

If you look at our charts you can see that RTX 4070 Ti loses quite some performance as the resolution is increased—more so than other cards in the same performance tier. For example, at 1080p, the 4070 Ti is 4% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, at 1440p both cards are evenly matched, and at 4K the 3090 Ti is 8% faster. That's a surprisingly big range; things are no different when compared to the RTX 7900 XT: -3% at 1080p, -6% at 1440p, and -8% at 4K. It's definitely not an architectural problem, because we're seeing the same trend against the RTX 4080, which is based on also based on Ada Lovelace: -10% at 1080p, -18% at 1440p and -25% at 4K. To me it seems that the underlying reason for this behavior is that the AD104 GPU has a ton of shading power, but becomes limited by its cache size and memory interface at higher, more memory-intensive resolutions.

This puts the RTX 4070 Ti in an interesting position. RTX 4070 Ti is an amazing choice for gaming at 1440p, at maxed out details. With RT disabled you'll be able to drive high-refresh-rate monitors easily with 120 FPS and more. If you turn on ray tracing you're still getting 60+ frames per second, even without DLSS. Turn on DLSS, and optionally DLSS 3 frame generation, and you'll hit your 120+ FPS targets with ease. At 4K the card works well enough to give you a solid gaming experience, but you'll have to dial the details down in some of the most demanding games to hit 60 FPS. While Radeon RX 7900 XT and RTX 3090 Ti are roughly the same performance as 4070 Ti at 1440p, they do scale considerably better at 4K, so they will get you those extra 10 FPS that make it easier to hit 4K60 everywhere.

Ray tracing promises to enhance your games with additional fidelity by using physically accurate rendering of light, shadows and reflections. RT is executed as an additional pass besides classic rasterization and comes with a serious performance hit. NVIDIA cushions that by including their third generation hardware ray tracing units on the RTX 4070 Ti, whereas AMD offloads most of that work to their GPU's shading units, even on the latest RDNA 3 architecture. The end result is that NVIDIA is clearly the better choice if you're betting on ray tracing, but the differences aren't exactly huge for the RTX 4070 Ti. It seems that due to the cache/memory configuration, the card sees a bigger performance hit from enabling ray tracing than other GeForce 40 cards, especially at 4K. That's not to say that RTX 4070 Ti is bad at ray tracing—it still is one of the fastest cards in that scenario, but the performance scaling is something you should be aware of.

Virtually all GeForce RTX 4070 Ti custom-design models are triple-slot and the Zotac AMP Extreme is no exception. The card offers good cooling performance at low temperatures. Even under full load we measured only 66°C. Unfortunately the default BIOS runs the fans at pretty high speeds, which makes the card the loudest RTX 4070 Ti that we've tested (out of six cards). This can be fixed easily by switching to the quiet BIOS, which reduces the fan speeds considerably. Now the card runs at 33 dBA, which is much quieter and comparable to other RTX 4070 Ti models, even though some of those are still much quieter, whisper quiet even. With the "quiet" BIOS, temperatures are barely increased, by 3°C, from 66°C to 69°C—nothing worth mentioning. That's why I recommend you always use the quiet BIOS, it's just quieter, there's no performance loss. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test reveals that Zotac's thermal solution is a little bit weaker than some competing cards, but the differences are quite small. As expected from all modern graphics cards, all GeForce RTX 4070 Ti models come with the idle-fan-stop capability that shuts off the fans when not gaming.

The highest priority for GPU engineers today is improving energy efficiency, as that's the limiting factor for performance improvements. With the other GeForce 40 Series cards we saw impressive advancements here, the RTX 4070 Ti is no different. It is considerably more efficient than all previous-generation GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA. It's even slightly more energy-efficient than AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XT Series cards, only the GeForce RTX 4080, RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XTX operate with higher efficiency. The result of these improvements is not only lower power draw, i.e. lower power bill and PSU requirements, the lower heat output also makes it easier for the thermal solution to keep your card cool and the fans can run at lower speed, emitting less noise. With slightly under than 300 W, the RTX 4070 Ti consumes roughly the same amount of power as the RTX 3070 Ti, while providing considerably better performance at the same time—300 W isn't a lot by today's PSU standards—a 650 W PSU should be able to power the system easily, maybe 750 W if you use a power-hungry CPU. Zotac's AMP Extreme does have surprisingly high non-game power consumption, possibly due to the RGB implementation, roughly 20 W higher than the NVIDIA reference card. In gaming, the differences are smaller, which means there's no significant efficiency loss from the factory overclock.

Overclocking just works—push the GPU and memory clocks up until the card is unstable, back down a bit, and you're getting good gains. On the new AMD cards, things are more complicated, you must use undervolting to achieve meaningful OCs, and bumping the power limit is almost a requirement, too. What I find surprising is that none of the cards available go above the NVIDIA default power limit of 285 W, probably to not lose energy efficiency. Overclockers will always want to push their cards higher and are willing to increase the power limits manually. We've seen many RTX 4070 Ti cards that give you only a small power limit adjustment range. Zotac is very generous here, the power limit can be increased up to 366 W, the highest setting on any RTX 4070 Ti card that we've tested. Unfortunately there seems to be a BIOS bug here that limits power in some way. In our testing we couldn't get more than 305 W out of the card, even with the limit set to 366 W. We're checking with Zotac if this can be fixed through a BIOS update.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti has been in stores for a few weeks now. Prices have stabilized, too, but there's still not a single card available at the $800 MSRP on Newegg. The most affordable models are the MSI Ventus and Zotac Trinity ($829). The Zotac AMP Extreme in this review is currently $880, with an optional $20 off promo code, which brings the price to $860. This makes the card a pretty competitive choice against other RTX 4070 Tis, which go as high as $1300... LOL, just buy a 4080 with that money. Strong competition comes from AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT, which is currently available for $880, with higher raster performance, but lower RT FPS and no support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The delta to RX 7900 XTX is another $200, which is quite a bit of money, but I can see how that would be tempting for many, especially with the next-best NVIDIA option so far away (RTX 4080 @ $1200).

There's not a lot of appeal in used last-generation GeForce 30 or Radeon RX 6000 Series cards. Maybe I'd consider a used RTX 3090 Ti, specifically for 4K, if I can find it at around $850, but the lack of DLSS 3 will probably be a dealbreaker for many. On the Radeon side you can find heavily discounted RX 6900 XT and 6950 XT cards at sub-$700 levels which are definitely an interesting choice, especially if you're focusing on raster-only performance. At the end of the day, RTX 4070 Ti is a great card in the current market, even though it feels overpriced, especially considering the "x70 Ti" naming. I find it pretty curious that there's now a huge $400 gap between two NVIDIA offerings with no model name space left in-between for a new model, so the coming months will be interesting to see how GPU prices continue to develop.