GeForce RTX 4070 Review: NVIDIA Ada Hits A More Mainstream $599

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

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Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 MSI GeForce RTX 4070 ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon 22.11.1 NVIDIA Drivers v531.42

Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 F1 2022 Guardians Of The Galaxy

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LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

The MSI GeForce RTX 4070 and NVIDIA Founders Edition cards performed similarly here. Both cards outpaced all of the Radeons we tested, with both models. They outran the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti as well, but slot in behind the RTX 4070 Ti and previous-gen RTX 3090 Ti.

Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...

Blender is capable of exploiting NVIDIA's RT cores using the OptiX backend API, which results in a massive uplift in performance for the NVIDIA-powered cards. That said, the standings look similar to Indigobench, with the GeForce RTX 4070s outperforming all of the Radeons and the RTX 3070 Ti.

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results

The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.


Although it's a completely different type of creator workload, the Blackmagic RAW Speed Test has the GeForce RTX 4070cards finishing in a similar position. In the 8K 3:1 test, all of the cards perform similarly due to system memory bandwidth limitations. In the 8K 12:1 test, which uses more compressed data, the field separates and the GeForce RTX 4070s land in the familiar position, just behind the RTX 4070 Ti, but ahead of the 3070 Ti and Radeons.