Watch How NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5070 Beats An RTX 4090 In Marvel Rivals At CES

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With CES 2025 behind us, we now have several product launches to be excited about. NVIDIA came out of the gate swinging with an impressive lineup of GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs. NVIDIA thought its GPUs were so impressive as to make a very bold claim, namely that the new mid-range GeForce RTX 5070 is faster than the current flagship GeForce RTX 4090. 

The GeForce RTX 4090 is a $1,599 GPU with 24GB of VRAM versus a GeForce RTX 5070 with a seemingly paltry 12GB of VRAM and much cheaper $549 MSRP. Our own Marco Chiappetta visited NVIDIA at CES and took a look at its demo of Marvel Rivals to see what is going on with the claim. The demo runs on a 4K 240Hz monitor, so plenty of pixels need to be pushed on this enthusiast grade setup. 

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The RTX 5070 on the right screen does indeed beat the RTX 4090 on the left, but only with DLSS 4 technology

The GeForce RTX 5070 gets a surprising 235 frames per second, while the GeForce RTX 4090 cranks out 180 frames per second. As stated in the video and by NVIDIA, this is only with its new DLSS 4 technology implemented on the GeForce RTX 5070. Not everyone agrees with this type of performance comparison, since we're not talking about apples to apples (or, more accurately, raw rasterization without any software tricks). That's a debate for another day (after we've had a chance to review the new GPUs).


That said, without DLSS 4, the GeForce RTX 5070 should be slower in most respects versus the GeForce RTX 4090. However, the GeForce RTX 5070 does have upgraded tensor cores and upgraded RT cores, along with a newer generation GPU architecture going for it. These will help with AI tasks such as DLSS, along with chomping at demanding ray-traced visuals in various games. 

Frame generation was big boon to the GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs over the previous generation, and Multi Frame Generation is another step up for the new GeForce RTX 50 series. Multi Frame Generation will give you three additional frames for every frame rendered, which explains why the lower-tier GeForce RTX 5070 soundly beats the GeForce RTX 4090 in the above demo. 

Keep in mind that not every game will support DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, so mileage may vary depending on the type of games you're playing. This technology is still impressive, however, since the drawbacks are minimized with additions such as NVIDIA ReFlex to minimize latency. With NVIDIA's AI machine learning, it has been able to render the image you see at a quality level typically hard to distinguish from native resolutions unless you're looking more closely. 

I've been a big fan of DLSS, especially with frame generation. It turned many games, such as Hogwarts: Legacy, into a much smoother playing experience that was noticeable when utilizing the technology. DLSS 4 is an even bigger upgrade, and NVIDIA has made it clear that AI is the way for us to see these improvements in the future over traditional hardware changes.