Well here we are in the new year and with it being CES time there are lots of new tech announcements and Nvidia has pulled the cover off of their latest 4000 Series GPU the RTX 4070 Ti and this is a case of what is old is new again as those of you who have been paying attention may recognize this as the unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB. After fixing that mistake and renaming the card we finally have the chance to check out Nvidia’s planned step below the RTX 4080. This is great timing as well, this is the first card launched after AMD’s 7900 XT and 7900 XTX and the 4070 Ti looks positioned to compete with the 7900 XT. The new cards don’t have a Founders Edition sadly but Nvidia along with Asus has sent over the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti OC that I’m going to check out so let’s learn a little more about the RTX 4070 Ti and then check out what Asus’s card is all about.

Product Name: ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti OC

Review Sample Provided by: Asus/Nvidia

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

What is the RTX 4070 Ti all about?

Like with the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 the new RTX 4070 Ti is also based on the Ada Lovelace and with that has brought a few big upgrades like the new 4^th generation tensor cores for AI processing and 3^rd generation ray tracing cores. The 4070 Ti is based on the AD104 GPU which is different from the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 which were on the AD102 and AD103 GPUs. Being Ada based the 4070 Ti is designed to work with DLSS 3 which includes frame generation which helps with huge performance improvements when running DLSS 3 even for CPU-limited situations and games. The AD104 GPU in the 4070 Ti has 35.8 billion transistors compared to 45.9 billion on the RTX 4080. But in the specifications below where I compare the 4070 Ti with the 4080 and last generation’s 3070 Ti you can see how big of a jump it is over the 17.4 billion that the 3070 Ti had. The new GPU has 5 GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters) which each have 6 TPCs (Texture Processing Clusters) which each TPC has two SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) making for 60 in total. For comparison, the 3070 Ti had 48 and the 4080 has 76. This translates to 7680 CUDA cores on the 4070 Ti, 240 of the new 4^th-gen Tensor cores, and 60 of the new 3^rd-gen ray tracing cores.

Nvidia has the RTX 4070 Ti boost clock turned up compared to both the 3070 Ti which ran at 1770 MHz and the RTX 4080 which runs at 2505 MHz, the 4070 Ti has a boost clock of 2610 MHz. the 12GB of GDDR6X memory is clocked lower than the RTX 4080 though running at 1325 MHz compared to 1400 MHz which is still faster than last gens 3070 Ti which had its 8GB of memory running at 1188 MHz. The one area where the RTX 4070 Ti drops in specs is its memory interface which is 192-bit whereas both the 3070 Ti and the 4080 have 256-bit memory interfaces. With that its total memory bandwidth is lower than either of the other cards at 504 GB/sec vs 608 GB/s on the 3070 Ti and 716 GB/sec for the RTX 4080. Like with the other Ada-based GPUs, the 4070 Ti does have a much larger L2 Cache compared to the last gen, the 3070 Ti had 4MB whereas the 4070 Ti has 49 MB. That is lower than the RTX 4080 which has 64MB, as expected. It is built on the same TSMC 4N NVIDIA Custom Process as the other 4000 Series cards and has the same 3 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI configuration as last gen and this gen. That is HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a and while the extra doesn’t matter on this range of card for comparison AMD did include DisplayPort 2.1 on their 7900 XT which is the competitor for the RTX 4070 Ti. For TGP Nvidia has the 4070 Ti listed at 285 watts which is 5 watts less than the 3070 Ti and because they don’t have a Founders Edition of this GPU at all the power connection will depend on the model with some having the new 12vHPWR PCIe Gen 5 cable and others with two 8-pin PCIe power plugs.

Before getting into testing I did also run GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti OC is an overclocked card which can be seen with its boost clock speed sitting at 2730 Mhz to the 2610 MHz that Nvidia has as their reference boost clock. While GPUz didn’t have full support for the 4070 Ti at the time of testing it did document the BIOS revision and testing was done with the 527.62 driver which was provided by Nvidia to the press to test before the launch.