Overall and Final Verdict
The latest in Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture wasn’t a big departure from the RTX 4070 Ti above it, mostly just cut down and with its clock speeds lowered. But with that what stood out to me more than anything in my testing was the power usage and overall efficiency of the card. You have performance that is competing with last generations RTX 3080 but power draw at its peak and averaged across a variety of tests lower than the RTX 3060 Ti. The performance-to-power comparison is only better with Nvidia’s highest-end cards, the 4090 and 4080. That efficiency helped them drop back down to a traditional card size, not the crazy size of the 4080 and 4090 Founders Editions. Even with the smaller card, however, the RTX 4070 Founders Edition impressed on all of its cooling tests and noise tests. Nvidia hit the sweet spot for performance, size, power, noise, and temperatures, and with that, this could be a great SFF card.
The overall performance comparison is a lot more nuanced. Like I said before the 4070 does run right with the RTX 3080, in fact at 1080p in our tests it was a touch faster with the 3080 pulling away as the resolution goes up. But like with the RTX 4070 Ti, it is the ray tracing and DLSS performance that is most impressive. In games that supported it, the 4070 was about to step up and be very capable at 4k while running ray tracing even. To complicate things though, the competition (AMD) isn’t on the same level when it comes to ray tracing and their version of DLSS (FSR) but when it comes to raw rastering performance the 6800 XT which is priced less than the RTX 4070 is faster and the 6950 XT which is most expensive but still close in pricing is even faster than that.
The Founders Edition does have a few downsides, but none of them are big issues. Like with the other 4000 Series Founders Editions the power connection is near the center on the top of the card and it is mounted facing directly up. Combined with the need for the power adapter for some this can get tight quickly in some cases and will also be hard to hide. I wish the design had the angled plug like the RTX 3080 which helped keep strain off of the connection as well. Thankfully this card is a lot smaller at least which will have fewer case issues. The other big issue for me is overall availability of the Founders Edition specifically. Like with other FE cards, it will be on the Nvidia website, Best Buy, and Microcenter which does give you options but I miss the days where this design was available at MSRP at all retailers. I’m a big fan of the all-metal construction and build quality of the cooler and would like to see if be easier to get.
I’ve kind of touched on it already but let's get to pricing. The RTX 4070 Founders Edition and other stock-clocked cards will be hitting stores tomorrow at an MSRP of $599. On the AMD side, the 6800 XT is currently selling for $539-$579 and the 6950 XT are running $629-$679. On the Nvidia side, the cheapest non-refurb RTX 3080 on Newegg is $699 with most at $898 and higher. So if we only look at the RTX 3080 the new RTX 4070 is a great deal especially once you add in DLSS 3 which isn’t available on the 3080. The AMD cards however complicate things. For raw raster performance, those are a great value in comparison, but that is before you put a value on the ray tracing performance and DLSS. Overall I would love to see the RTX 4070 come in lower competing with the 6800 XT. But if ray tracing and DLSS/FSR are your main focus and I do believe in the future those are going to be key to gaming performance the RTX 4070 starts to become an option.
Live Pricing: HERE
