How did we get here?
The RTX4070 is NVidia’s latest Graphics card and in a place where they could have reset the market and blown the doors off of both of their comptetitors, it seems they have pulled up short. By the many reivews that have come out, it appears this GPU had performance room taken from it during manufacturing. Why? It’s also priced fifty to a hundred dollars more than maybe it should.
This isn’t the first time a company has put out a GPU that doesn’t make sense. Nvidia themselves did it with the GTX1070Ti, and AMD most recently did it with the RX6500. The 1070Ti was launched in a very tight market when GPUs could still be easily overclocked and had to be kneecapped so it stayed under the more expensive 1080 and 1080Ti. The 1070Ti was $399 where the 1080 came out for the $599 price we see for this one.
AMD’s grand effort was the RX6500 that had a PCI bus configuration that was one quarter the size of many other cards. That may be fine for newer systems running on a 4th generation high speen bus, but PCI gen3 was half the speed. I mention that because many of these cards were being used in older systems because of price. A price that by many accounts was still too high around $230. Even at $200, it was a hard sell. The RX6400 was even worse, but had a low profile option. Even with a slower transfer rate, it was better than other LP options.
The RTX4070 advantage?
The new offering from NVidia does have a few things going for it. It sips power. In a time where the 4090 needs 600 watts of power, the 4070 gets by with a max of 200. That also means it runs cooler, and can be smaller. One of the largest complaints about the higher end 4000 series is the size of the cards. Larger power draw means more heat which needs a bigger cooler. The 4070 doesn’t have that challenge.
It also does have Deep Learning Super Sampling 3, which doesn’t exist on previous series cards, or AMD at all. AMD does have a similar tool in Fidelity FX Super Resolution, negating part of that advantage, though. One thing that can’t be negated is a superior video encoder. The NVenc encoder still reigns supreme, and although newer AMD cards carry the AV1 encoder, some platforms don’t support it. If the streaming platform doesn’t support a process, then that process, no matter how good it is, may be useless. And the AV1 encoder IS a great tool.
So the only real question is the price. Is $600 too much to ask for a card that barely beats the next tier from the last generation? AMD has superior cards for a similar price if you are just worried about frames per second, but they also draw more power and lack some of the featues. Still, they are great cards, and do make more sense. Well, if any of these cards make sense at current pricing.
My Conclusion?
The RTX4070 is not the worst ever. That honor still goes to the RX6500 from AMD, BUT it’s on the list. The GTX1070Ti may be neck and neck with it, but selling this card for fifty bucks less would have probably kept it from being considered at all. Something to think about is the $500 for the RTX3070 at launch, would now be about the $600 for the 4070 today due to inflation and current market conditions. Money doesn’t go as far as it once did. Still, we want to feel like we are getting our money’s worth.
We probably are, but it doesn’t feel like it.
Check out the YouTube video here.