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 with the 3Dmark DLSS test. This test was done on each Nvidia card testing the performance of each compatible DLSS at 4k and the performance setting. For DLSS 4 the tests are run with frame generation set to x4. The Prime RTX 5070 Ti comes in behind the RTX 5080, no surprises there. This does put it out in front of the RTX 4080 SUPER by 8 FPS in the DLSS 3 test. What is impressive here though is getting a look at the possible performance improvements that DLSS can offer. This is a best case scenario but we started with an average of 41.86 FPS and jumped up to 75 FPS with DLSS 1. DLSS 2 improved on that to 102 FPS and DLSS 3 did it again up to 144 FPS. DLSS 4 with frame generation x4 is the most impressive however taking that up to 255 FPS. That is a 521% improvement over the base result!
I also wanted to take a look at DLSS 4 performance as well a little more than my initial look at it with 3DMark’s benchmark. For this, I put Nvidia’s Frameview to the test to run a few benchmarks using the games that currently support DLSS 4. For games with a built-in benchmark, I ran the benchmark but used frameview so we could get the FPS and 1% lows and because some of the game's frame generation is messing up their in game FPS readouts. V-Sync was turned off on all of the tests because it currently causes problems with frame generation and all of the tests were done at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k with the highest detail settings including the highest RTX settings. DLSS 4 when there is an option was set to performance.
My first test was with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. For this game, to get Frame Generation x4 you will have to use the Nvidia App to force it but as you can see with the results below it is worth the trouble. At 4k we went from 55 FPS up to 126 FPS with DLSS 3. Frame generation x4 improved on that more taking it up to 159 FPS. This was a smaller improvement than what I have seen in other situations, but still a nice performance bump especially with the 1% lows getting close to 120 FPS.
Next up I tested with Hogwarts Legacy and for this test, I tested with DLSS as a whole on or off. Testing in the middle of a fight scene and with the settings cranked meant that without DLSS on even at 1080p, the frame rate was less than steller reaching 106 FPS at 1080, 79 at 1440p, and just 42 FPS at 4k. With DLSS on however those numbers skyrocketed. At 4k that improvement was especially impressive going from 42 FPS up to 240 a 471% improvement. Also to note, the 1% lows saw a big improvement as well but the gap between the frame rate and the 1% lows does get larger with DLSS on.
I tested in the new Star Wars Outlaws and this was run with all of the detail and ray tracing cranked up. You can see with DLSS off the Prime RTX 5070 Ti struggled at all three resolutions. With it on 4k performance went from unplayable to playable but still not smooth. At 1440 and 1080 on the other hand, performance went up into the playable and smooth range with over 250% performance improvement on all three resolutions.
Last up I did even more Cyberpunk 2077 testing. Because I already looked at this in our standard tests I took the chance to check out the difference in performance between the CNN and Transformer settings alongside seeing the DLSS 4 performance improvement. This was done with ray tracing cranked up and again at those settings the Prime RTX 5070 Ti struggled at all three resolutions without DLSS being on. With DLSS on that changes jumping from 14 FPS at 4k up to 163 with Transformer on. In all three resolutions, the new Transformer settings did lower performance slightly, but the difference was small especially compared to the visual improvements that Transformer offers over the older CNN setting.
