The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is an absolute gem of a graphics card that particularly improves on the non-Super RTX 4070 while also outperforming the current mid-range champion overall, AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT. Still, its higher SM count is still hampered by too little VRAM and too high a price tag for the mid-range, on the verge of being the best graphics card for gamers, but it doesn’t have to be the best to be the graphics card on the market. now.
Fantastic performance
Same value as the MSRP of the RTX 4070 version
Higher Base and Core Clock
Gorgeous design
Gamers will have fun with the RX 7800 XT
Still 12 GB of VRAM
Increased consumption
Still expensive for a midrange card
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is a graphics card with a lot of expectations around it after its announcement at CES 2024, and if you haven’t yet upgraded your graphics card in a minute and are waiting for a signal, this edition is what you need. I’ve been waiting, whether you end up buying it or opt for a competing card from AMD or Intel.
If we look at the Nvidia graphics card lineup in 2023, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 is definitely considered one of the most productive from Team Green thanks to its functionality and higher available value compared to the rest of the GPU market at the time. At $599. 99 in the US (around £480/AU$840), the RTX 4070 Super will go on sale (at MSRP) at the same launch price as the card it upgrades, while the RTX 4070 will get a big price drop when the RTX 4070 Super goes on sale on January 17, 2024.
In terms of what you get for the same amount of money, you get a lot more SM for more processing power, as well as a slightly faster base clock speed. But unfortunately, we’re still stuck with just 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM, which hampers the performance of this card. 4K potential. If you’re looking for the most productive 4K graphics card, you may have to wait to see what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super will offer at the end of January.
If you’re looking for the most productive 1440p graphics card on the market, in terms of performance, look no further. Between the advanced specs and DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex, and a host of other technologies included in this card, you’ll be able to play the most productive PC games in the best settings with the most productive 1440p monitors for many years to come.
Still, it’s not an unqualified win for Nvidia here. For one, the price of the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super is still $100 (about £80/AU$140) more than the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT that it’s directly competing with. And while the RTX 4070 Super does outperform the best AMD graphics card for the midrange on a number of levels, gaming sadly isn’t one of them, unless you lean heavily on ray tracing.
Even in places where DLSS is preferred, with no frame generation, Nvidia is generally the RX 7800 XT when it comes to gaming. And once AMD releases its own frame generation for FSR in the coming weeks, the merit Nvidia DLSS 3 gets with Frame Generation will also be reinforced. At this point, players will have to ask themselves tougher questions than anyone else, and the value of the RX 7800 XT alone may be more than enough to tip the scales. to them.
Still, it’s hard to argue that Nvidia hasn’t delivered a surely phenomenal card with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and for mid-range users who need gaming as well as content creation features and raw performance, it’s almost certainly it will. Be the most sensible in the list when choosing a new update.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super will go on sale on January 17, 2024 for $599. 99 in the US. It is available in the US (around £480/AU$840), which is the same value as the launch MSRP of the RTX 4070 when it launches in April 2023.
And while we love to see prices stay more accessible for gamers and creators, Nvidia is still charging a premium for its card vis-à-vis AMD’s competing RX 7800 XT, which has competitive performance for about $100 less.
Still, while it’s not the most productive affordable graphics card on the market, from what you get, the RTX 4070 Super is very well priced overall for cash. While it’s not exactly AMD’s levels of functionality for the price, it’s about as smart a price for money as an Nvidia GPU on the market today (at least until we see the performance of the RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super later this month).
Value score: 4/5
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition is hands down one of the best-looking graphics cards I’ve had in a long time. The fairing, enthusiasts, and all-black trims give it a very sleek look that the Simpson dazzled with third-party RGB cards, but when it comes to Nvidia’s lineup, it’s by far the best-looking.
In every other way, barring the Super branding, this card is identical to the original RTX 4070, so it comes with all its positives and negatives as well. Its smaller than its larger siblings, so its much more manageable in a wider variety of cases, but it is still heavy enough that some kind of GPU support is going to be needed if you don’t have a vertical card adapter for your case.
The cooling solution is also quite clever and has plenty of power for cooling. Its 16-pin connector means that if you don’t have an ATX 3. 0 power supply, you’ll want to use a two-8-pin to one 16-pin adapter, which can make cable control a bit tricky.
Design Rating: 4. 5/5
When it comes to the RTX 4070 Super, there is a lot to appreciate here. For the same price as the RTX 4070, you’re getting a far more SMs (56 to the RTX 4070’s 46, a 21% increase), so that also means that you’re getting a hefty upgrade in terms of CUDA cores (7,168 to 5,888), ray tracing cores (56 to 46), and tensor cores (224 to 184) over the original RTX 4070.
You’re also getting a slightly higher base clock rate of 1,980MHz , which is about 3% faster than the base RTX 4070. For that, the RTX 4070 Super also has a 220W TGP, which unfortunately means that you’re not going to get any RTX 4070 Super cards with an 8-pin connector like you can with the RTX 4070.
Beyond that, there aren’t many differences in terms of specs with the RTX 4070 Super compared to the RTX 4070, and that unfortunately includes the 12GB GDDR6X VRAM configuration. Mind you, this is enough for 1440p gaming, but if you have one of the most productive 4K monitors, you have to settle for some setup compromises if you need serious 4K gaming.
It’s a dual-slot card that’s the same length as the RTX 4070 Founders Edition and uses the same cooling solution, so it’ll run a little hotter thanks to the increased force flowing through the card, but it’s not a total to be visible.
In terms of performance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is about as solid a graphics card as you’ll find in the midrange, offering fantastic gaming performance, while outshining the competition in non-gaming tasks like content creation and compute-heavy workloads.
In artificial workload tests, the RTX 4070 Super loses out to the RX 7800 XT in some tests while winning in others, so when you think about ray tracing, it’s a bit washed out. However, once ray tracing is included, you end up with around 23% superior ray tracing functionality for the RTX 4070 Super, which is to be expected given the maturity of Nvidia’s generation compared to AMD’s.
It’s also worth noting that the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super’s computing functionality is about 18% higher than the RX 7800 XT, and overall, the RTX 4070 Super outperforms the RTX 4070 by about 17%, on average.
Moving on to creative benchmarks, as expected, the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super outperforms the AMD RX 7800 XT when it comes to 3D rendering tasks thanks to the strength of Nvidia’s CUDA processing, which most renderers use.
In terms of rasterization performance, the two cards are more or less equivalent, while the RTX 4070 Super outperforms the RX 7800 XT in terms of video encoding, albeit only by about 1%. Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4070 Super renders 3-D scenes and pixelates noticeably faster, but it’s almost equivalent on the video encoding side.
However, when it comes to gaming performance, the RX 7800 XT is ahead of the RTX 4070 Super, especially at lower resolutions.
In 1080p gaming, the RTX 4070 Super consistently lags behind the RX 7800 XT when ray tracing isn’t factored in, and when it is, this advantage is generally diminished (on average) when bringing balanced upscaling to bear, though the RTX 4070 Super and the RTX 4070 tend to do much better than the RX 7800 XT when pure ray tracing is involved.
Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4070 Super offers an average build-up of around 14% in FPS over the RTX 4070 at 1080p, a merit that I expect to be amplified once bigger drivers are released to the RTX 4070 Super after launch.
The story is similar with 1440p gaming where the RX 7800 XT generally outperforms the RTX 4070 Super when ray tracing is rarely very complicated and lags when it is.
Upscaling is also useful here, however, speaking, the RTX 4070 Super will outperform the RX 7800 XT when it comes to ray tracing and overall offers around 9% more fps than the RTX 4070, on average. I suspect the latter figure will be higher once the post-launch drivers are installed, as the RTX 4070 outperforms the RTX 4070 Super in Metro: Exodus when it shouldn’t, so I think this game is something of an exception when it comes to controllers.
In 4K, the RX 7800 XT manages to hold up better in absolute terms than its larger 16GB symbol buffer versus the RTX 4070 Super’s 12GB, but GDDR6X memory and more mature ray tracing cores make 4K ray tracing a better overall experience. the RTX 4070 Super than either of the other two cards tested here.
At the end of the day, the question is whether you’re really excited about ray tracing performance. If that’s the case, the RTX 4070 Super is the card you need, but for $100 cheaper, the RX 7800 XT offers a much bigger edge. more attractive option for purely raster graphics than the RTX 4070 Super. This ultimately prevents the RTX 4070 Super from earning the name of the most productive mid-range graphics card, but it’s a much tougher fight for the RX 7800 XT than it is for it. That’s when it was first introduced against the RTX 4070.
Performance Rating: 4. 5/5
Read the full AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT review
Read the full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review
Here’s the formula we used for the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super:
I spent about a week working with the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super, including using it as my main work PC graphics card for content creation work. I ran our standard battery of tests on it and its two main competitor cards due to time constraints (you can see my RTX 4070 review for its relative performance versus many more cards, and than consider a roughly 12%-15% better performance over that for the RTX 4070 Super).
I’ve been overhauling computer hardware and adding graphics cards for years, and I’m fully aware of the kind of functionality you can expect from a graphics card right now. I use this wisdom in my graphics card evaluations and ensure that each and every graphics card I compare to the reviewed card is re-checked with the maximum of recent drivers for maximum applicable and productive knowledge for comparison purposes, including (as in this case) CAS), This means that I check only the maximum. applicable competitor cards to provide the reader with maximum vital comparative knowledge when considering the purchase of their next graphics card.
First revision in January 2024
We pride ourselves on our independence and rigorous review testing process, paying long-term attention to the products we review and making sure our reviews are up-to-date and maintained, no matter when a device launches, if you can still buy it, it’s on our radar.
Learn more about how we test
John (He/He) is the editor here at TechRadar and is also a programmer, gamer, activist and Brooklyn College alumnus who lately lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Named through CTA as a Media Pioneer at CES 2020 for his science and generation reporting, John specializes in all areas of computing, aggregating industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and social influence of technology. industry. .
You can find him online on Threads @johnloeffler.
Lately I’ve been playing: Baldur’s Gate 3 (like others).
Nvidia RTX 3050 6GB seen in store, but the specs don’t allay our fears that this is a GPU glitch
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super review: second only to the RTX 4090, and finally worth buying
Samsung will unveil an ultra-fast DDR5 memory chip: 8. 0 Gbps per pin, the 32GB module is approaching GDDR5X speeds, and 128GB memory modules are likely to appear
TechRadar is from Future US Inc. , a leading foreign media organization and virtual publisher. Visit our corporate website.