Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For the RTX 4070 Founders Edition, we don’t have a matching RTX 4070 to compare it to just yet but I am curious how it compares to the previously released RTX 4070 Ti, the RTX 3070, the 3070 Ti, and both the RX 6800 XT and 6950 XT from AMD. This should give us a good look at both AMD and Nvidia’s last-gen models that are priced above and below the 4070 and see how big the gap is between the 4070 and the 4070 Ti.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RTX 4070 Founders Edition came in behind the RTX 3080 in all three of the Fire Strike tests and ran ahead of the RX 6750 XT. This means it was also ahead of the 3070 and 3070 Ti but well behind the 6800 XT and 6950 XT which in the case of the 6950 XT was almost 10,000 points higher in two of the three tests.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. Both of these tests are a little newer and utilize DX12. The Nvidia cards which were down in the charts for the Fire Strike tests do better here. The RTX 4070 Founders Edition edges out the RTX 3080 in the base Time Spy but is still behind it in the Extreme test. This puts it well out in front of Nvidia’s last-gen xx70 cards. This wasn’t enough to catch up to the 6800 XT or the 6950 XT which are still out in front by a good margin, but the gap is smaller at least.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is their latest benchmark. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines in more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until now 3DMark has only used in feature tests. Going off of Nvidia’s usage numbers a majority of 4000 Series card owners are utilizing both DLSS and RTX when it is available so this may be a better look at what Nvidia owners will see, at least in games that have those features. The RTX 4070 Founders Edition scored a 4470 which put it behind the 3080 but surprisingly is in front of the AMD 6950 XT.
The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the RTX 4070 Founders Edition sits behind the 6800 XT from AMD in this test on both the 1080p and 4 results. It is out in front of the last generation 3070 Ti and close to the RTX 3080 for the 4K result at least.
