I’m Dreading this Review – RTX 4070

okay let's do this reviewing the RTX 4070 is kind of a no-win situation for me because on the one hand everyone is furious about the unaffordability of modern gpus and rightly so but on the other hand I have to acknowledge that this is the best value proposition that we've seen in years then on the other other hand there's the fact that Nvidia who controls all of this appears to be making this product look like a good value by simply making all of their other ones a terrible value I really do wish I could just sit this one out because by the time I'm done at least some of you will have misdirected your anger toward me the messenger but here goes the segue to our sponsor videocom making a presentation for worker school let video com help you spice it up by adding annotations webcams videos and images and much more with just a few simple clicks check them out at the link down below looking at the specs alone the RTX 4070 is pretty underwhelming at just 295 millimeters squared this is the smallest 70 class GPU that we've seen since the GTX 770 and with the same Cuda core count as the RTX 3070 this is the first time ever that Nvidia hasn't given us more shaders generation over generation but but wait wait not out there are some things to get excited about here um boost clocks have risen a whopping 43 compared to the RTX 3070 and the change to 12 gigabytes of gddr6x memory is a welcome upgrade it's we continue to watch vram usage in modern games go from unreasonable to downright idiotic to quantify our excitement then the lab performed a whopping 984 tests across 11 gpus with CPUs from both Intel and AMD we're going to have links down below they even threw in the Intel rk770 for funsies now 1080p performance in rasterized games might seem kind of irrelevant for an Enthusiast tier GPU these days but for many competitive Gamers High frame rates are way more important than high resolution and if you're one of them the RTX 4070 is proper quick with performance Landing within two percent of the RTX 380. this might not be the leap forward that you were hoping for but given the pricing of even second hand 3080s it's kind of looking like a w kind of give me a sec at 1440p the story Remains the Same with the 4070 neck and neck with the RTX 3080 but what really stood out to us here at both of these resolutions is how flipping fast amd's last gen has gotten thanks to their ongoing software updates the 6800 XT now enjoys a small lead over the 3080 with the 7900 XT coming in a whole 40 percent faster than the 4070 and nearly matching the RTX 4080 a GPU that costs 400 more then at 4K the 4070s W gets even more twisted and complex because outside of Forza the RTX 3080 ends up outrunning it by anywhere from 5 to 19 percent or at least it does until you turn on Ray tracing where the Gap Narrows significantly now the story Nvidia wants to focus on here is not how the 4070 beats last gen by 25 to 30 percent but rather on how it convincingly destroys the GTX 1080. from my point of view though beating a seven-year-old card is not the most incredible of Feats unless you name zintel it's just obvious that Nvidia is bringing this up because they recognize the generation over generation upgrade it's not that big and they hope that it's all you Pascal owners out there that are finally gonna bite the bullet and upgrade moving on to productivity in our benchmarks there was one standout in Photoshop the Intel Arc a770 was able to best not only the 4070 but also the 4070 TI and was even within spitting distance of the RTX 4080 I mean I'm not sure that the average user updating their Tinder profile is going to notice but whatever Hardware acceleration Intel built for Arc definitely works then outside of Photoshop Arc returns to its rightful place at the bottom of the stack and the rest of the story remains largely the same as gaming with the RTX 3080 and 4070 Trading Places depending on the exact workload and AMD once again showing off that fine line driver development outside of blender which remains a sore spot for team red the 6800 XT put on an amazing show winning more titles than it lost at a lower price so if we're looking at the performance of an RTX 3080 but at the price of an RTX 370 TI given how crap GPU prices have been for the last couple of years this is great right well yes but saying an RTX 4070 for 600 is better than an RTX 3080 for like what would it Peak at 1600 or something like that that's like saying that a paddle to the ass is better than a slap to the face both can be fun when the kids are out of town and we do have matching couples undies on lttstore.com by the way to make this even more awkward but none of that is the point the point is that when compared to last gen sure Nvidia gave us a solid increase in performance but they also gave us an equally solid increase in price and this is the second time in two generations that they've pulled this move when we went from the 1000 series to the 2000 series they did the same thing we got a nearly proportional increase in both price and performance with Nvidia hoarding the benefits of their new architecture and using them to line their own Pockets rather than passing them along to the consumer you see the industry Norm has been that as our manufacturing technology improves the same amount of compute becomes less expensive in this case Nvidia went from Samsung's 8 nanometer node to tsmc N5 that's how they packed the same number of Cuda cores into just 295 millimeters squared compared to the 392 millimeter square die of the 3070 which is super cool but then if it supposedly didn't cost any less why the heck did they even bother well there are two reasons for that efficiency and then probably more importantly the RTX 4090 but let's talk efficiency first for the amount of performance that the RTX 470 delivers it sips power it has a tgp of 200 Watts but Nvidia says that the average gaming power draw is more like 184 and in our testing that was basically bang on which is darn impressive given that the performance comparable RTX 3080 Drew an average of 296 Watts during the same test also a good sign is that the maximum recorded wattage of the 4070 was just 233 watts compared to a whopping 412 for the 3080. so not only will you be saving money on your monthly Energy bill but you also don't have to worry about a power Spike sending your aging power supply into the shadow Realm now you might be hoping that this means there's a lot of Headroom for overclocking but sadly it looks like Nvidia has really locked this card down and we weren't able to meaningfully improve performance by tinkering with any of the knobs and dials I don't think that the sufficiency gain is why Nvidia decided to go tsmc 5n though and it might actually have been better for consumers if they just took everything they learned about the mature eight nanometer Samsung node and then made better gpus with it kind of like what they did back in 2014 using the same 28 nanometer node for both the GTX 770 and 970. the issue though is if they had done that the RTX 4090 simply wouldn't have been feasible it would have drawn too much power and it would have given AMD an opportunity to have a competitive Flagship which would be utterly unacceptable the 4090 is a true generational leap coming in at just seven percent more cost than the 3090 while being over 50 faster so then why the heck isn't that true of the rest of the lineup Nvidia well because from their point of view they did give you a generational performance leap but through AI rather than raw Grunt and In fairness they aren't entirely wrong here by turning on dlss3 frame generation the RTX 4070 is able to easily dispatch the RTX 3080 and even deliver performance about on par with the 4080 before its AI assistance is kicked in now frame generation may increase input latency but Nvidia reflex does go a long way towards bringing it back down is it as good as Simply Having a faster GPU and not using any of these tricks that's a topic for another video sadly our Labs team really does need to do things like sleep even if it's in their tents adding to nvidia's argument currently there are dozens of games that support DLS S3 and the list is rapidly expanding so you might as well just turn it on but detracting from nvidia's argument there are also tens of thousands of games that do not support dlss3 and will perform better on the 6800 XT making the 4070s position more precarious is the fact that pricing of 30 70s and 3080s on eBay has been in free fall Pro tip by the way don't use buy it now because auctions have been completing literally a hundred dollars lower now it's worth noting that the 4070 has some non-gaming generational advantages it's new so it'll have driver support for longer and it comes with a warranty and it features av1 encoding and decoding which is genuinely great and as a bonus this thing has been shockingly stable for being so early in its life cycle AMD could learn a thing or two this is a really good product but that doesn't mean that we are unreservedly happy about it Nvidia is whining about how they simply can't pass along any silicon cost savings just doesn't hold a ton of water development costs for new process nodes have increased substantially but I also think that Nvidia does have some room to move here if everyone else's pricing is anything to go by one day Arc will save us but it is not this day this day I'm going to tell you about our sponsor vessi it's April and you know what that means rain that's where Vesti comes in they claim their shoes are 100 waterproof keeping your feet dry during those unexpected downpours take them on and off with ease vessi has designed their shoes to be stretchy and convenient to wear their slip-ons yes with a wide range of styles available you're sure to find a pair that fits your lifestyle even better their shoes are made from cruelty free products right down to the glue no more checking the 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,756,469

Keywords: RTX 4070, Nvidia, Gaming, Geforce, RTX 3080, RTX 4070Ti, RTX 4080, RTX 4090, RX 7900X XT, RX 6800 XT, AMD, Radeon

Id: nkh9VGCY8as

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023