GeForce RTX 5070 FE Review: NVIDIA’s More Affordable Blackwell Tested

With all of the AI, creator, and synthetic tests out of the way, let's move on to the actual games. Homeworld 3 is the latest installment in the long-running real-time strategy (RTS) series, developed by Blackbird Interactive and published by Gearbox Software. Released in mid-2024, Homeworld 3 continues the space saga that began with the original Homeworld game. We tested Homeworld 3 at a couple of resolutions -- up to 4K -- with and without resolutions scaling enabled.

Homeworld 3 Benchmarks

Homeworld 3


Homeworld 3 GeForce RTX 5070 FE Details @ 4K Resolution

The GeForce RTX 5070 FE competes favorably with AMD''s Radeon RX 7900 XTX in Homeworld 3, and easily outruns the RTX 4070. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti holds onto a clear lead over the RTX 5070, however, and the RTX 5070 Ti is a significant step up.

With FSR 2 or DLSS enabled (sans frame generation, Balanced preset) at 4K, framerates approach the same level as 1440p, and we see a familiar trend. The GeForce RTX 5070 FE remains ahead of the previous-gen RTX 4070, but it can't catch the RTX 4070 Ti.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Benchmarks

This result doesn't make much sense, but was repeatable nonetheless. A driver fix may remedy this one, or perhaps this game just doesn't run properly on Blackwell. In any case, the GeForce RTX 5070 FE ends up trailing even the RTX 4070 here, though still manages over 60 FPS at 4K. 


Lending further credence to some sort of incompatibility or driver bug, the GeForce RTX 5070 FE's performance with DLSS (with or without frame generation enabled) doesn't scale like the other cards and it finishes near the bottom.

The Talos Principle II Testing

Assassin's Creed Mirage Benchmarks

There's not much new to see here. The GeForce RTX 5070 FE outpaces the RTX 4070 and offeres significantly better 1% low framerates, but it still can't quite catch the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

Black Myth: Wukong Benchmarks

F1 24 Racing Sim Benchmarks

F1 24 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) features and NVIDIA technologies, like DLSS with frame generation. We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what these graphics cards could do.

F1 24

F1 24 had the GeForce RTX 5070 FE and RTX 4070 finishing right on top of each other, with a slight edge going to the RTX 5070 at both resolutions.


With DLSS or FSR 2 (Balanced) enabled in F1 24, all of the framerates obviously increase, but the GeForce RTX 5070 FE sees a more significant boost than the RTX 4070 and ends up extending its lead.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks

Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game franchise. The tabletop game was published for the first time all the way back in 1988, and the intervening 30-odd years has not changed the game world all that much. As a result, Cyberpunk 2077 looks somewhat retro-futuristic, as this is how people in the '80s imagined what the future would look like.

The PC game make use of virtually every advanced DirectX graphics technology and features support for DLSS, FSR and XeSS, and after a somewhat rocky release, it has been significantly updated and optimized for a multitude of hardware configurations. Although it is no longer considered a new title, Cyberpunk 2077 remains a showcase for many advanced graphics technologies.

We tested a pre-release version of Cyberpunk 2077 that's been updated with support for DLSS 4's transformer model and multi-frame generation. This is an important note because Cyberpunk foreshadows how future games, that are optimized for the Blackwell GPU architecture and the RTX 50 series, may perform relative to previous-gen GPUs. 

With native rendering, the GeForce RTX 5070 FE is closer to the RTX 4070 Ti's performance level and it outruns the RTX 4070 by nearly 20%. But this game is a current showcase for DLSS 4's new, higher-quality transformer model and offers support for multi frame generation.


As you can see, with each successive level of DLSS with multi-frame generation enabled, the GeForce RTX 5070 FE moves up the stack and puts up triple digit framerates at 4K. Injecting those additional frames smoothes out the on-screen animation significantly, and the GeForce RTX 5070 FE finishes behind the RTX 5070 Ti with over 130 FPS, which is nearly a 7x improvement over native rendering.

Because this game also supports NVIDIA Reflex technology, latency is also low enough that you still feel engaged while playing with frame generation enabled, and image quality is also improved, thanks to the use of NVIDIA's updated transformer model. You can see some of the ways the new transformer model helps DLSS here.