Our Verdict
67%
Awesome 2,560 x 1,440 gaming performance and superb power efficiency for a completely baffling price.
The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti was originally called the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and priced at $899 / £899, but Nvidia quickly ‘unlaunched’ it after negative feedback about its high price and modest specs. Now relaunched with a price drop of $100 / £100, it has been renamed the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. For this review, we’re testing a Zotac AMP AIRO GeForce RTX 4070 Ti model.
Looking for the GeForce RTX 4070 review, rather than the Ti version? You can now read our full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review to see how Nvidia’s latest mid-range GPU performs in our benchmarks.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti features
This rebranding was definitely a move in the right direction, as this Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GPU is nothing like a GeForce RTX 4080 with just 12GB of memory. For starters, it’s based on a completely different chip, the AD104, which has a die area of 295mm², whereas the RTX 4080 is based on the 379mm² AD 103 die. It also has a tighter memory interface that’s 192 bits wide, compared to the 256-bit interface on the RTX 4080.
That smaller chip also means there aren’t anywhere near as many CUDA cores at your disposal. The RTX 4070 Ti has 60 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) enabled, each with a corresponding RT core, and making for a total of 7,680 CUDA cores – a big drop of 2,048 from the 9,728 in the RTX 4080.
One area where the RTX 4070 Ti does have a slight upper hand is clock speed, with a stock boost clock of 2.61GHz, which is 100MHz quicker than the RTX 4080’s boost frequency. What’s more, the Zotac card we’re reviewing here adds another 90MHz to that figure to give it an extra edge, and in real gaming tests it regularly peaked at 2880MHz.
Zotac has also done a very fine job with its AIRO card. It’s absolutely massive, with a length of 356mm and a width that takes up 3.5 expansion slots, but it never made any irritating noise at all during our grueling gaming benchmarks.
It really looks the business, and Zotac has gone to town on the lighting. There’s a gorgeous RGB glow coming from under the backplate edge and the Zotac logo on the back, as well as all along the top edge of the card. There’s also an array of light-up lines on the right-hand edge, which adds a further touch of elegance to the generally curvy design.
It looks great behind a glass panel, and Zotac’s RGB software allows you to tweak the lighting, with slide, rainbow, marquee, drop, dance, duet, and path effects, and you can select custom colors on a wheel – the marquee chase effect looks great running across the card.
There’s no direct compatibility with motherboard RGB software (it didn’t work with Aura on our Asus test motherboard), but there’s an RGB cable in the box to hook it up directly to your motherboard, as well as a support bracket.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti performance
At Custom PC, we’ve been reviewing the latest gaming GPUs since 2003, and we run a number of grueling benchmarks in order to gauge performance. Our game tests include measuring the frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, and Metro Exodus, all with and without ray tracing, and we also test with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Nvidia has made some bold claims about the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, including that it’s up to three times faster than the previous flagship, the RTX 3090 Ti in Cyberpunk 2077. We’re going to tackle that claim first, as it’s highly misleading. If you’re using like-for-like settings in this game, there’s barely any difference between the performance of these GPUs – the RTX 3090 Ti is actually a little faster at 4K, thanks to its larger allocation of memory.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Assassin’s Creed Valhalla performance
The only way you get more performance out of the RTX 4070 Ti is by enabling Nvidia DLSS 3 AI frame generation, which the RTX 3090 Ti doesn’t support. This does indeed enable the RTX 4070 Ti to output some impressive numbers, averaging 81fps with a 69fps 99th percentile result at 4K in our preview test build of the game, compared with an average of 46fps for the RTX 3090 Ti with Medium ray tracing and standard DLSS enabled, but it has little to do with the GPU’s processing power.
In our other tests, the performance of this Zotac card isn’t far off the RTX 3090 Ti, being either behind or in front of it by a couple of frames per second. Pricing aside, in the current lineup of GPUs, the RTX 4070 Ti’s performance is definitely competitive too.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Doom Eternal performance
Looking at the 2,560 x 1,440 results, which is the optimal resolution for the GPU, the similarly-priced Radeon RX 7900 XT is definitely ahead when it comes to rasterization. There’s a difference of 20fps in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, 16fps in Cyberpunk 2077, and 14fps in Metro Exodus. Crucially, though, the RTX 4070 Ti is still easily fast enough in these games at these resolutions.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Cyberpunk 2077 performance
The RTX 4070 Ti also beats the Radeon RX 7900 XT when you enable ray tracing, although the differences aren’t enormous. It hits a 50fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 with Medium ray tracing at native 2,560 x 1,440, with a 43fps 99th percentile result, which is playable even if it isn’t smooth, but it’s much quicker than the Radeon RX 7900 XT’s respective 44fps and 37fps results here. Push the ray tracing up to Ultra settings, and set DLSS to Quality, and it puts out a solid 73fps average and 58fps 99th percentile result.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Metro Exodus performance
It can also cope with a fair bit of 4K gaming, hitting our frame targets in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Metro Exodus with no ray tracing enabled, and happily ticking along at 171fps in Doom Eternal at Ultra Nightmare settings with ray tracing. You won’t be able to play many games at native 4K with ray tracing on this card, but there’s a good chance it will be able to cope in games that support DLSS3.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Metro Exodus power consumption
Finally, one area where the RTX 4070 Ti excels is power efficiency. Our system only drew 451W from the mains with this overclocked card running at full load. That compares with 503W with the Radeon RX 7900 XT, and a massive 691W with the RTX 3090 Ti, with the latter result showing that Nvidia has made huge strides in performance per Watt with the Nvidia Ada architecture.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti pros and cons
Pros
- Great 2,560 x 1,440 gaming performance
- DLSS 3 support
- Decent power efficiency
Cons
- Radeon RX 7900 XT faster at rasterization
- Only 12GB of memory
- Who comes up with these prices?
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti specs
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti specs list is:
| Stream processors / CUDA cores: | 7680 |
| RT cores: | 60 (3rd-gen) 80 ROPs |
| Tensor cores: | 240 (4th-gen) |
| Base clock: | 2310 MHz |
| Max boost clock: | 2610 MHz |
| Memory: | 12 GB GDDR6X, |
| Memory clock: | 1313 MHz (21 GHz effective) |
| Memory bandwidth: | 504.2 GB/s |
| Memory interface: | 192-bit |
| Card interface: | 16x PCIe 4 |
| Power connectors | 1 x 16-pin / 3 x 8-pin |
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Price
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is $840, making it not as expensive as Nvidia’s other Ada GPUs, but it’s still out of reach for many buyers.
Price: Expect to pay $840 / £840.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti review conclusion
If it didn’t have such a ridiculous price, the RTX 4070 Ti would be a fantastic GPU. It’s highly power efficient compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, while offering similar performance, and it really enables you to turn up all the ray tracing eye candy in games at 2,560 x 1,440. The Radeon RX 7900 XT has more raw shading power, but it’s also more expensive at the moment, and the RTX 4070 Ti has superior ray tracing abilities to the AMD GPU.
The price is a problem, though. The cheapest RTX 4070 Ti card we could find in stock at the time of review is around $840 / £840 – it’s a long, long way from the $499 / £469 launch price of the RTX 3070, which amazingly offered similar performance to the RTX 2080 Ti at nearly half the price. Comparatively, the RTX 3090 Ti has been going for $1149 UD / £1149 for the last couple of months, and it hardly seems an amazing feat that an $840 card now offers similar performance.
That’s a shame, as we’d happily pay an extra premium for this well-built, quiet and gorgeous-looking Zotac card if the starting point weren’t so high. As it is, the current price is simply far too much to ask for a 2,560 x 1,440 gaming card, and we advise holding off to see what happens to prices later in the year. For more gaming GPU options, check out our guide to the best graphics card where we cover several options at a range of prices.