This is a 4090 Killer… and I’m a Liar - RTX 5070 Review

When NVIDIA's CEO told the world that the RTX 5070 would deliver RTX 4090 performance for almost one third of the price, I said- I'll believe it when I see it. But now that it's here, it's clear that I was wrong. I'm seeing it, and yet I don't believe it.

This is Cyberpunk running at 4K on our 5070, and it is getting more FPS than the RTX 4090 that is right beside it. But how many blades does that fan supposed to have? And does my car have extra bumpers?

Impossible with our artificial intelligence. Obviously, the RTX 5070 was never gonna match the 4090's capabilities without a little bit of, uh, AI doping. But come on, I was at least hoping that it would beat the RTX 4070 Super in raw power, and yet in Alan Wake at 1080p these two cards are dead tied, and at 1440p it wins by a mere one FPS.

Is there anything to be excited about? Well, yes. In spite of his advancing age, LeBron is actually dunking better than ever.

No, I mean about the RTX 5070. Sorry, despite NVIDIA's advancing profits, dunking on them is better than ever. All right then, let's get to it after this layup to our sponsor.

Threatlocker, I went to their Zero Trust World event last month where they had some awesome activities, and even unveiled a few new advanced features like web control and patch management. Click our link in the description or keep watching to the end of the video to learn more. Since this is currently NVIDIA's entry card for the 50 series, why don't we start with our entry resolution, 1080p with all real frames, no DLSS upscaling and no ray tracing.

And you know what? While we actually did get identical performance to last year's 4070 Super in Alan Wake 2, we did find improvements in some other titles. Black Myth: Wukong sees a 5% increase, and we even got a sizeable 8% improvement in average FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 and in Returnal.

Unfortunately, that's where our good times stop rolling 'cause in Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part One and F1 2024, the 5070 actually. . .

loses to the 4070 Super? I need a moment to process this. Okay, I'm good.

And now it's time to add insult to injury because not only does it lose to its last gen counterpart, but in F1 it also loses to AMD's RX 7800 XT, a GPU that launched a year and a half ago for $500 US. But all right, Linus, maybe the move to GDDR7 though is gonna help it pull away from the crowd when we kick our resolution into mid-gear. Mid-gear is 1440p.

Oh boy, you guys better be ready for this because instead of tying in Alan Wake 2 this time, the 5070 wins by one frame per second. But instead of losing to Red Dead Redemption 2, it ties this time. As for the rest, it looks like overall at 1440p the 5070 manages about a 4% improvement over the 4070 Super, though this card was never meant to compete in traditional raster.

Let's talk more about ray tracing results. Let's do because it turns out when NVIDIA uses AMD's kryptonite and starts tracing rays, the 5070 pulls away from team red pretty handily, beating even the mighty 7900 XTX on average across our 1080p test suite. However, it is worth noting that if we remove Black Myth: Wukong, which was a bit of an outlier, it falls back to bouncing in between the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti.

Wait, try to read positively. Uh, okay. The good news is that at 1440p, uh, who am I kidding, it's literally the 4070 Super again, with only Returnal standing out as a clear win with a.

. . 6.

5% uplift. As for 4K, guys, we didn't even bother testing that due to the 5070's anemic 12 gigabytes of VRAM. What is the deal with this card then?

The 5070 Ti might not be available at its MSRP, which totally blows, but at least that card performs in theory. It's like 30% better than this thing. That is not a Ti/non-Ti difference.

So, why does the 5070 feel like a whole lower class of card rather than a proper 70? Well, because it pretty much is. We won't dive too deep into NVIDIA's new Blackwell architecture since we've done it a few times already, but we do need to talk about which Blackwell dies goes into which cards 'cause it turns out that the 5070 Ti is using the GB203 die, and while the 5070 is using the GB205.

And unfortunately in this case, a higher number does not mean that it's better. It has significantly fewer RT cores, fewer tensor cores, fewer shading units, fewer TMUs, and fewer ROPs, and I think you get the point by now. And if we actually go back in time and compare this to the 3070 family, both of those use the same GA104 chip with the only changes being a 4% bump in CUDA cores, a 2% bump in clock speeds, and an upgrade from GDDR6 to GDDR6X memory.

Oh, sorry Linus. That's why they perform similarly, but one being a bit more Ti than the other. This time around the 5070 Ti is more like a cut down 5080, and the 5070 is more like a roided out 5060, which would be fine if they were priced accordingly.

Okay, but surely there's gotta be somewhere that this card stands out. Oh, and there is, but I don't know if you're gonna like it. To NVIDIA's credit, their AI improvements in their Blackwell architecture do really shine through in, well, our AI tests, where not only does it beat the 4070 Super, but it seems to perform more like a 4070 Ti Super.

Of course, with that said, AI workloads really benefit from lots of VRAM, and the 12 gigs on this card definitely ends up preventing it from being legitimately useful with larger models. The updated media engine is another bright spot, though. The 5070 pulls ahead of the 4070 Ti Super in DaVinci Resolve, and even gets within striking distance of the 5070 Ti in Premiere Pro.

But with that said, if you were thinking, "Oh, sick. Well, the 5070 is a productivity wunderkind then," don't get ahead of yourself 'cause in our Blender barbershop test, we are right back to 4070 Super performance. Maybe it runs super cool and efficient though?

Uh, about that. While the 5070 looks like its bigger Founders Edition brothers, there's one key area here where it loses the genetic lottery. Only one of those two fans in its blow through design actually blows through the fins and out the other side.

This resulted in us seeing a 73 degree average in F1 and a 77 degree average in Kombustor. Yikes. It's not thermal throttling or anything, but this puppy is getting as hot as the 5090 was, which is a little surprising given it's using less than half of the power of the 5090.

It is a much smaller card, making it easier to fit in a small form factor build or something, but just make sure you've got plenty of ventilation so it can stay cool. As cool as you'll look in our new framework hoodie with the all over embroidery. It's expensive, but it looks cool.

LTTstore. com. It really is cool, isn't it?

Oh, you're back. Uh, all right. Dunking aside, the question is, is this new card for anyone?

And believe it or not, the answer is yes, but it probably isn't you. See, the target market for the RTX5070 is not your PC gaming enthusiasts or your PC building enthusiasts, it's gamers which sound like the same thing, but hear me out. See, enthusiasts are gonna peep at pixels.

They're gonna obsess over the little details. Whereas gamers, well, they just demand more pixels and higher FPS. And whether you personally like AI upscaling or NVIDIA's frame generation technology which interpolates extra frames from fewer real ones, there's no doubt that NVIDIA has delivered on lots of pixels at high framerates.

And if you enable those features, the 5070 really does match or even beat the raw numbers of last generation's flagship. And most gamers, unless their base framerate is so low that they notice the sluggish input latency, probably won't care. And I guess that's fine.

The problem, though, is that not every game supports these magical more FPS buttons. And in unsupported titles, this card is a steaming pile and the only silver lining is that, I guess, by sucking so hard it probably won't get scalped much. Oh, wait.

No, there is one other silver lining. If you can wait about 24 hours, AMD is launching a price competitor to this thing that has 33% more VRAM and, on paper, much better performance. Of course, it's AMD we're talking about here, so- I won't want to see it.

Just like I'll believe this segue to our sponsor. Threatlocker, their Zero Trust World Cybersecurity Event happened last month and I attended to check out some of the super cool sessions and workshops, along with some hands-on demonstrations, like where we used a Hak5 rubber ducky to mess around with some laptops and there was also guest speakers like Reggie Fils-Aime. They also announced a few new features.

Insights collects data from millions of endpoints worldwide and presents them as actionable information, saving you countless of hours of researching. And patch management consistently scans devices for outdated applications and those in need of patching. Plus, they even have web control which can easily build libraries of restricted websites and add another layer to your cybersecurity cake.

So go learn more about the new features to their comprehensive security software today by clicking our link in the description. Thanks for watching, guys. If you want to find out more about some of the issues that can crop up with AI frame gen, go check out our gaming at 8K video to, uh, see why it could be an issue even if you're not an image quality snob.