NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti evaluation: 3090 Ti energy for $799 | Engadget

NVIDIA’s new RTX 40-series GPUs are insanely highly effective, but in addition wildly costly. That’s my massive takeaway after reviewing the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 — certain, they’re quick, however who can justify spending over $1,000 on a video card? With the RTX 4070 Ti, which debuted at CES 2023, NVIDIA is providing a barely extra cheap various. Starting at $799, it is nonetheless pretty expensive, however a minimum of it is underneath $1,000. And better of all, it is in some ways higher than final yr’s 3090 Ti, which initially value a whopping $2,000.

After saying two RTX 4080 playing cards just a few months in the past, NVIDIA stunned us all when it “unlaunched” the $899 12GB mannequin. Given its a lot decrease specs, there have been loads of complaints that it appeared a bit too costly to be referred to as a 4080. So now we have got the 4070 Ti at $100 much less, with the identical 7,680 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X reminiscence that the 4080 was speculated to get. Sometimes, yelling at firms on-line will get outcomes.

If you’ve got bought a small case, the 4070 Ti may additionally be the primary RTX 40-series GPU you’ll be able to really use. Both the 4080 and 4090 Ti had been triple-slot behemoths — they took up a big chunk of my pretty roomy mid-tower case – whereas the 4070 Ti simply wants two. It additionally requires far much less vitality than both of these playing cards, since it could possibly run with a 700-watt PSU and has a most energy draw of 285W. (The 4080 requires a 750W PSU, whereas the calls for an 850W unit.) NVIDIA says the 4070 Ti makes use of round 49 p.c much less energy on common than the 3090 Ti.

Given the place it sits alongside the RTX 4080, the 4070 Ti carried out precisely as I anticipated. It clocked in round 20 p.c slower in 3DMark’s TimeSpy Extreme Benchmark, in addition to the Geekbench 4 Compute take a look at. It was additionally a full 30 fps slower whereas taking part in Halo Infinite in 4K with maxed out graphics settings. Now these numbers might sound disappointing, however I used to be ecstatic to see them. Sure, it is slower, however the 4070 Ti is definitely maintaining pretty effectively with a card that is $400 costlier (and in lots of circumstances, far extra). That’s one thing to have fun!

NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 upscaling expertise additionally proved to be extremely helpful as soon as once more. I reached a easy 78fps in Cyberpunk 2077 whereas taking part in in 4K with graphics ray tracing settings set to excessive. And should you want much more frames, you’ll be able to at all times bump right down to 1440p with DLSS 3, the place I managed to succeed in 90 fps. The 4070 Ti additionally blew away the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX in Blender’s benchmark, although which will have been as a consequence of unoptimized drivers on AMD’s half.