Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Arrives With A More Affordable Price, Efficiency And Great Performance

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is ramping up in Las Vegas, and many innovative tech companies are using the event to showcase their products for the coming year in 2023. Nvidia has historically taken advantage of the venue to launch new GeForce graphics card technology for PC gamers, and this year is no exception. Wednesday marks the launch of the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, a more cost-effective and significantly more energy-efficient variant of the company’s powerful new Ada Lovelace GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) architecture.

The new RTX 4070 Ti is widely understood to be a rebranding of the company’s previously “unlaunched” GeForce RTX 4080 12GB card, which was met with some confusion in the market, primarily due to its configuration of compute cores (Nvidia CUDA cores) and memory that aligned with a more mid-tier configuration, though its performance was on another level. It was an interesting catch-22 of sorts for the company, since the card’s performance profile aligns with much higher-end cards from its previous generation, though its physical configuration is more aligned with upper-midrange graphics cards these days. Hence, the unlaunched GeForce RTX 4080 12GB was reborn and rebranded as the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and it’s poised to be a standout product in the market for a number of reasons, though there are caveats.

GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Trades Blows With Nvidia’s Previous-Gen $2K Card

Without getting too far into the weeds of CUDA core counts and memory bandwidth, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which will be sold exclusively by OEM board partners, is based on the company’s AD104 GPU (Ada Lovelace), and is a cut-down version of the same GPU architecture in the company’s new ultra-high-end GeForce RTX 4090. Compared to the previous generation GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 4070 Ti GPUs are comprised of thousands more powerful Nvidia Ada CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X memory, versus just 8GB in the previous gen, though with a narrower memory interface and less memory bandwidth overall. Further, at an MSRP starting at $799, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti cards will cost at least $200 more versus the previous generation’s $599 MSRP, so there’s a price to pay for these resources and more horsepower.

However, performance-wise, Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 Ti chalks up gaming benchmark numbers that are in-line, or trades blows with the company’s previous generation flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, which currently sells for around $1700 – $1800 at online retailers. This is a huge performance lift, relatively speaking gen-on-gen, and a much better performance-per-dollar value proposition, though the RTX 4070 Ti’s price point may still put it out of reach for gamers on a budget. Regardless, let’s take a quick look at some numbers from Marco’s review at HotHardware.

As you can see, in these modern game titles, Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is actually slightly faster overall than an RTX 3090 Ti, and typically is in the hunt with AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 XT that retails for about $50 – $100 more, depending on OEM model. Although, the AMD card has 20GB of frame buffer memory, for a bit more breathing room at high resolutions, versus the RTX 4070 Ti at 12GB. Either way you slice it, Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is compelling, and especially when you look at the power numbers.

Nvidia’s Ada Is Powerful And Surprisingly More Power-Efficient

The other aspect of Nvidia’s AD104 GPU and partner OEM graphics cards that will be built upon it, are its relatively strong power consumption characteristics. Here below are a gathering of some of the latest crop of both Nvidia and AMD competitive graphics cards, as well as previous generation high-end cards. The results the team at HotHardware were able to gather were surprising, actually.

Here we see the new ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti OC Edition card pulling the least amount of total system power under load and one of the lowest idle power numbers as well. Some gamers might not be as concerned about this, as gaming desktop PCs typically have high power and thermal budgets at their disposal. However, in terms of acoustics and thermals in general, this new crop of GeForce RTX 4070 Ti cards should prove very well-behaved and generally more tame than both the previous generation and competitive offerings as well.

The only puzzling caveat I’d have to report on here is the actual size of the first few GeForce RTX 4070 Ti series cards I’ve seen break cover. The long and short of it is, that end users may have a tough time accommodating some of these new RTX 4070 Ti cards in their PC case, and in fact I had to test the ASUS card I have personally here on an open air bench, because its height was simply too tall for my mid-tower chassis. Indeed it does appear that the cooling solutions employed on these new GeForce cards are currently a bit overkill. Someone build a GeForce RTX 4080 and 4070 Slim line, please.

All told, I’d have to hand it to Nvidia for delivering on very strong performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt metrics here with the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. Cards should be hitting retail and etail shelves in the coming days and I’d expect the sell-through numbers to be strong.