In addition to the Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition, I also received a second MSRP-priced RTX 5070. The second card was from Asus, their Prime RTX 5070. Like with the RTX 5070 Ti, at launch Asus has three different card designs in their lineup for the RTX 5070. They have the Prime RTX 5070, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070, and the Strix RTX 5070 with all three having stock clocked and overclocked models. Our Prime RTX 5070 is the stock-clocked model. We already saw how the RTX 5070 can perform but I’m excited to get a direct comparison on how a larger aftermarket cooler changes performance and compares to the Founders Edition. Well, no point in wasting any time, let’s get into it!
Product Name: Asus Prime RTX 5070
Review Sample Provided by: Asus
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is new?
Nvidia announced a lot with this one so let’s try to touch on as much as we can. They of course had a few hardware announcements for the 50-Series. They have announced four cards, the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 Ti, and the RTX 5070. That is the new 50-series RTX family. The slides below include their focus on them. The 5090 for example is targeted at 4k 240 Hz and the other three are targeted at 2k or 1440p performance. They all have GDDR7 VRAM with the flagship RTX 5090 having 32 GB and a 512-bit interface. The RTX 5080 cuts that in half to 16 GB, the RTX 5070 Ti also has 16GB, and then the RTX 5070 has 12 GB.
The new GPUs are based on the Blackwell architecture and they do have new updated RT and Tensor cores with that being the 4th gen for the RT Cores and 5th gen for Tensor cores. The new tensor cores can now also handle floating point (FP) 4 along with FP8 and FP16. They also have introduced an AMP processer which is the AI Management Processor to help schedule AI tasks alongside of graphics rendering. They have increased the number of NV encoders and decoders, it now depends on the card model and isn’t a flat number of them across the entire generation of cards. They have also moved to PCIe Gen 5 and DisplayPort 2.1b including UHBR20. For pricing the RTX 5090 comes in at $1999, the RTX 5090 is half that (just like its memory) at $999. The RTX 5070 Ti is $749 and the RTX 5070 is $549.
Some of the main goals with Blackwell were to optimize the neural workloads and reduce the memory footprint. No big surprises there. Memory is one of the more expensive parts of the cards and anyone who has been paying attention knows that neural workloads and AI have been where Nvidia has been seeing the biggest improvements. Combining those things they have brought AI into shaders with neural shaders. The example of this they show is a hair being rendered with ray tracing and how using spheres rather than triangles helps use less data which means less VRAM and higher frame rates.
Nvidia announced Transformer which replaces CNN as the model they use with Super Resolution. They have improved the design significantly to get better detail when scaling this up. On top of that, they announced DLSS 4 which has improved on the frame generation that they introduced with DLSS 3. It is now Multi Frame Generation. Where before they were able to generate every other frame, they can now do x3 or x4. This gets interesting once they add in DLSS Super Resolution as well because that is already rendering ¾ of the image. With both, they are rendering 15 of 16 pixels using AI. Of course how well this works then depends a lot on how good the renders are. But it gives huge improvements in performance and with frame generation, we know that those improvements still happen even if you are PCU limited for example. The example they show has DLSS off at 27 FPS, turning on Super Resolution it goes to 71 FPS. DLSS 3.5 gets you to 140 FPS and DLSS 4 is 248 FPS. DLSS is already supported by a LOT of games and Nvidia is saying that DLSS 4 will have 75 games and apps supporting DLSS 4 at Day 0. Some of those will be by using the Nvidia App, which can override the DLSS settings on some games. It is also important to note that some of these features will go back and work with legacy cards as well. Specifically, DLAA is going to work back to the 20 series of cards, same with the improved DLSS Super Resolution. The new multi-frame generation however only works with 50 series cards.
They also introduced a new Nvidia Reflex. Reflex helps improve responsiveness to get lower latency through the entire pipeline. Were Reflex offered 50% faster responsiveness the new Reflex 2 gets you 75% by using frame warp. They say that is coming first to 50 series and will be available in games like Valorant soon.
For comparison, I have the RTX 5070 specifications along with the RTX 5070 Ti that just previously launched and the two previous xx70 GPUs, the RTX 4070 and RTX 3070 listed together for comparison. The RTX 5070 does have its own GPU, it doesn’t share the same GPU as the RTX 5070 Ti which can be seen with its own codename as well as a difference in die size and transistor count as well. Interestingly the RTX 5070 does have fewer transistors than the RTX 4070 and the die size has gotten smaller each generation even though the RTX 4070 was made on the same 4nm process. The RTX 5070 when compared to the RTX 5070 Ti drops down one GPC to 5. It has the same number of CUDA cores per SM (128) like all four models listed here do but the SM count is 48 for the RTX 5070 down from 70 on the RTX 5070 Ti. The CUDA count going from the 3070 or 4070 which have the same 5888 CUDA core count isn’t as large of a jump going to the 6144 of the RTX 5070 as we would normally expect (4.3% in total). Nvidia has increased the Tensor and RT cores and seems to be relying more on the jump in clock speed as well which is 2512 MHz, a big jump when compared to the RTX 3070 (1725 MHz). Ray tracing FLOPs show a significant change from the new 4th-generation core design. The RTX 5070 has the same 12GB of VRAM as the RTX 4070 has, the RTX 3070 had less with 8GB. The GDDR7 is clocked faster so while it does still have the same 192-bit interface there is a big jump in memory bandwidth. The texture unit count has dropped down but even with that, the fill rate did improve slightly from 455 up to 482. For video engines the RTX 5070, like the other Blackwell GPUs does have the new NVENC and NVDEC engines but just one of each this time around. For power, the TGP has been dropped down from the 300 watts of the RTX 5070 Ti to 250 watts. This is higher than the 4070 (200W) and the 3070 (220W) so it will be interesting how it performs in our power testing.
Before getting into testing I ran GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The Asus Prime RTX 5070 is available as an overclocked model and stock clocked and we have the stock-clocked model. GPUz confirmed that with its 2512 MHz clock speed. I tested using the 572.50 Beta driver that was provided to press ahead of the launch by Nvidia. The BIOS version is also noted as well for future reference.
