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. With this being our first look at the RTX 5070, I am curious to see how it compares to the RTX 5070 Ti, the RTX 4070, and the RTX 3070 which is the most likely upgrade path. For AMD I want to see how it compares to the RX 7800 XT which is currently selling closest to the RTX 5070’s MSRP.
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 5070 Founders Edition came in the middle of two different overclocked RTX 4070 Ti’s. It did outscore the 7800 XT by a good margin at least. In the Fire Strike Extreme test, it moved up slightly and was ahead of the 7900 GRE and behind the 4070 Ti SUPER but still with that big gap between it and the 7900 XT. In Fire Strike Extreme the gap between the 7800 XT and the RTX 5070 Founders Edition shrank and it dropped down closer to the RTX 3090 Ti.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In the base Time Spy test, the RTX 5070 Founders Edition scored 22221 which put it above the RTX 3090 Ti and below the 7900 GRE. The 4070 Ti is still out in front here by a good margin and the gap between it and the two previous xx70 generations was 25% (4070) and 62% (3070). Time Spy Extreme was similar with the RTX 5070 Founders Edition improving on the RTX 4070 by 25% again and 58% on the 3070.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition did a lot better in these tests. For the Speed Way test, it scored a 5805 and came in front of the 4070 Ti and is not far off from the 7900 XTX. In Port Royal, it was just in front of the 7900 XT and it improved on the RTX 3070 by 67%.
The last test is the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition sits ahead of the RX 7900 GRE and behind the overclocked RTX 4070 Ti for this test. Once again the improvements we see over the previous xx70 cards are great but the 4070 Ti outperforming it feels bad every time I see it.
