RTX and DLSS

Being an RTX card I also like checking out the performance of some of Nvidia’s features. Namely the ray tracing performance and the performance improvements you can see by using DLSS combined with the tensor cores. My first test goes back to our synthetic benchmarks with 3DMark where I check out their Port Royal benchmark. This is the one test that does also have AMD Ray Tracing support which is great to get a look at how different cards including older non-RTX cards perform. The RTX 4070 Ventus scored 11181 which was 25 points below the RTX 4070 Founders Edition. The two 4070’s, the 6950 XT, and the 3080 are all close together here in performance.

3DMark also has added in a few feature tests, one being a look at DLSS performance. For this one, I have the resolution set to 4K and I test with all three versions of DLSS as well as with it off completely. All DLSS are set to their performance setting as well to keep the results comparable. This gives us a great look at the performance improvements that DLSS has given with DLSS 3 also including frame generation. The RTX 4070 Ventus’s numbers are right on with the Founders Edition, no surprises there with both having the same clock speed. With DLSS 2 both cards are just 1 FPS lower than the RTX 3080. More importantly, this shows you how much more performance DLSS 3 can get you and how much each generation has improved things going from 22.93 FPS with no DLSS and with DLSS 3 at 85.02 FPS nearly four times the performance.  

I then jumped into game tests, this time with Watch Dogs: Legion. For this one, I wanted to get an idea of the performance you will see when taking advantage of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS features. I tested at 4k with the ultra detail setting and with ultra being the setting for DLSS and RTX when they are on as well. I then test with no RTX or DLSS on and then with RTX DLSS on and off and on together. Here the RTX 4070 Ventus matched the 40 Founders Edition in two of the four results, then was faster in the DLSS Only test by 2 FPS and 1 FPS lower in the combined result. While this graph is sorted by the all-off result both 4070s outperformed the RTX 3080 in both of the tests that had DLSS on but were behind it in the RTX-only test.

Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which we have used for testing for a long time now. This test is similar as well with it set to 4K and Ultra detail, I use the included benchmark to test DLSS and RTX individually and then with them both on and both off to give us a look at overall frame rates depending on which direction you go. I should point out that this is using the Enhanced Edition where our normal benchmark uses the standard version for testing with AMD but that version DLSS no longer works. That said the RTX 4070 Ventus is ahead of the 4070 Founders Editon in the RTX-only result but sorted below it because of the nothing-on result which has it .24 of an FPS below it. Both cards are close to the RTX 3080 and well out in front of the RTX 3070 Ti which is the next lowest card on the chart.