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

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from UL. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading. Time Spy is designed to test the DX12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the UL Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

UL 3DMark Time Spy DX12 Benchmarks

3DMark Time Spy has the NVIDIA and MSI GeForce RTX 4070 cards performing about on par with a GeForce RTX 3080, but a notch behind an RTX 3080 Ti. The cards clearly outrun the RTX 3070 Ti, however. Note the significant jump in performance moving up to the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

UL 3DMark Port Royal Ray Tracing Benchmarks

Port Royal was released as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable support for the feature.

If we add some ray tracing into the mix with Port Royal, the GeForce RTX 4070 series cards continue to outgun the RTX 3070 Ti and Radeon RX 6900 series cards. The GeForce RTX 3080 pulls ahead by a couple of percentage points, though. And the RTX 4070 Ti finishes near to the top of the charts.

DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) Feature Test

We also tested the cards with UL's DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test. This test is laser-focused on path-tracing performance, and uses few of the card's other resources.
Unlike Port Royal, this test is solely focused on DXR performance and showcases the strength of Ada's newer RT cores. Here, the GeForce RTX 4070s are able to overtake the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and all of the Radeons. Though again, the RTX 4070 Ti offers significantly more performance.


UL recently launched the Speedway DirectX 12 Ultimate benchmark. We're beginning to compile results with this new test and figured we'd throw some into the mix here. The overall score here is essentially the framerate, sans the decimal point. We haven't put a ton of cards through this test yet, but suspect the standing would look similar to Time Spy...

Crytek Neon Noir Benchmarks

The Crytek Neon Noir benchmark has the new GeForce RTX 4070 cards finishing just behind the Radeon RX 6900 XT, near the bottom of the stack. They clearly outrun the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, however, at both resolutions.

VR Benchmarks: VR Mark & Unigine Superposition

Superposition is the latest benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in too. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some excellent visuals. We ran Superposition's VR Future benchmark to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition VR Future Test

In our first VR-related benchmark, the GeForce RTX 4070 cards once again outperform the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The GeForce RTX 3080 is a significantly step up in performance, however, and the rest of the cards simply extend the lead.

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


VRMark tells essentially the same story as Superposition. The MSI and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 cards were roughly 17% faster than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, but they couldn't catch the GeForce RTX 3080 or higher end cards here.