Nvidia’s latest offensive in the graphics card market has begun with the launch of new RTX 40-series Super GPUs. The GeForce RTX 4070 Super, the first of these new cards to hit store shelves, brings significant performance advancements over the “mundane” RTX 4070 at no additional cost. That’s right, it maintains the $599 price point, giving gamers significantly higher frame rates (and value) over a card released less than a year ago. What’s not to love? Not surprisingly, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super easily claims an Editors’ Choice award.Souping Up the RTX 4070Coming less than a year after the release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, the RTX 4070 Super doesn’t see any major architectural changes. Instead, to supercharge this graphics card, Nvidia went with a more straightforward option: boosting the core count. The original RTX 4070 was based on an Nvidia AD104 GPU die containing 7,680 CUDA cores, but only 5,888 of those cores were active.
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(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The GeForce RTX 4070 Super is also based on the AD104 GPU die, but with 7,168 cores active, representing roughly a 22% increase. This comes along with similar increases in other shading resources, with the new card employing roughly 22% more texture mapping units (TMUs), raster operation processors (ROPs), and ray-tracing (RT) cores as well. Exact figures are found in the chart below.
The memory system is unchanged from the non-Super RTX 4070, with 12GB of GDDR6X RAM connected to the GPU over a 192-bit interface with aggregate bandwidth of 504GB per second. Clock speeds have changed only slightly, with the Super’s base clock 60MHz higher but the memory clock and turbo clocks untouched.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The only potential step back that I can see is the RTX 4070 Super’s power consumption compared to the standard RTX 4070’s: 220 watts (W) instead of 200W, a 10% increase. However, given the more than 10% boost in resources, this is actually a promising sign that overall efficiency might be a bit better.The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders EditionAs is usually the case, Nvidia sent one of its Founders Edition cards for our review. We’ve already unboxed the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, but to recap, the thermal solution is nearly identical to earlier RTX 40-series Founders Edition GPUs. The card feels high-quality and well-made, with two fans at opposite ends of its shell.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The rear I/O panel is standard fare, with three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI port, and the card is powered by a 12VHPWR power connector.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
As the 12VHPWR is not fully standard on modern power supplies, Nvidia supplies an adapter to convert two 8-pin PCIe power connections to a 12VHPWR.Test SetupThe current test platform that I use for graphics card reviews has an Intel Core i9-12900K processor operating at stock clock speeds on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. The system has 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM clocked at 5,600MHz, with a Corsair Hydro Series H100X water cooler installed to keep the processor from overheating.The testbed has a 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro NVMe 4.0 solid-state drive as the primary storage device and a Corsair HX1500i 1,500W 80 Plus Platinum power supply. All tests are performed under Windows 11 Pro with the latest updates installed.
In terms of both specs and price, the main competitors to the GeForce RTX 4070 Super are Nvidia’s original GeForce RTX 4070 and the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. The former has received a $50 price cut to make room for the RTX 4070 Super, dropping the older card to $549. Discounts are always good news, but an 8.3% drop in price doesn’t sound compelling if the new card makes good on its 22% increase in resources.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
As for the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, it’s priced at $499, a solid C-note below the GeForce RTX 4070 Super. That should certainly help attract buyers if the AMD GPU can come close to the new Nvidia card’s numbers. Now we just need to run the benchmarks and see how things stand.Synthetic TestsAs far as our synthetic benchmarks go, it’s an open-and-shut case for the RTX 4070 Super. The new GPU showed better performance across the board when matched against the original RTX 4070 and the Radeon RX 7800 XT.
Synthetics need to be considered carefully, as they don’t reflect real-world performance, but if this trend continues there’ll be no question about the GeForce RTX 4070 Super’s dominance in its segment of the GPU market.FSR, DLSS, and Ray-Tracing TestsNvidia’s graphics cards tend to excel in games that support ray-tracing, and the RTX 4070 Super is no exception. If anything, it fared better in these tests than it did in the synthetics.
Starting with F1 22, the GeForce RTX 4070 Super took a commanding lead with a 13% to 16% advantage over the vanilla RTX 4070 and a 26% to 30% edge over the Radeon RX 7800 XT. The RTX 4070 Super actually did well enough in this test to surpass the much more expensive AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, though it did fall behind at 4K. It also performed slightly closer to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti than the standard RTX 4070.Enabling FSR and DLSS mixed things up, doing more to enhance the prospects of the AMD cards than the Nvidia products. The RTX 4070 Super was no longer able to match the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT here, and it roughly tied the RX 7800 XT (though handily outrunning the original RTX 4070). Switching to FSR 2.0 and DLSS 3 shuffled the deck again, giving the new Nvidia GPU a win over the RX 7800 XT at 1440p resolution, but little else changed.I’m still working to collect numbers for Returnal and Cyberpunk 2077, the two newest tests in our GPU benchmark suite, so the data here doesn’t tell us as much. We did see the RTX 4070 Super again pulling close to the RTX 4070 Ti, especially at 4K.Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game has shown a preference for Nvidia hardware, so it’s another test that doesn’t tell us much. The RTX 4070 Super scored an unexpected win over the RTX 4070 Ti, but that could be due to driver tweaks since the 4070 Ti was tested.AAA Game TestsIn games that don’t support ray-tracing, the new Nvidia card’s advantage decreases. This brought the Radeon RX 7800 XT closer, though the GeForce RTX 4070 Super still maintained the lead.
In Total War: Three Kingdoms, the RTX 4070 Super’s advantage over the RX 7800 XT shrunk to between 7% and 13%, while its roughly 15% edge over the original RTX 4070 stayed about the same. The Radeon card fared worse against the new GeForce in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where the performance gap diminished to just 6% at 1080p resolution but grew to 18% at 1440p and 4K. In Far Cry 5, though, the performance difference was squashed, due to the title running into either a processor or game engine bottleneck on higher-end GPUs.Legacy Game TestsI’ve noted before that performance in legacy games is more a test of driver support than GPU power. That’s still true, but we can’t ignore that it was here we saw the GeForce RTX 4070 Super fall behind the Radeon RX 7800 XT for the first time.
In Bioshock Infinite, the AMD card held a 9% advantage at 1080p resolution. This flipped with a nearly 11% lead for the RTX 4070 Super in the same game at 4K (its lead at 1440p was a less notable 4%).The RX 7800 XT claimed another fleeting victory in Hitman Absolution at 1080p and 4K, though the RTX 4070 Super pulled ahead at 1440p. Our last legacy test, Sleeping Dogs, was an unqualified win for Nvidia.Power and ThermalsWe measure power consumption with a Kill-A-Watt wall meter, the result including the power draw of the entire system (all other hardware unchanged) and not just the graphics card in question.
The GeForce RTX 4070 Super gave mixed signals here. Its power draw in Guardians of the Galaxy came close to that of the RTX 4080, but it was still behind the RX 7800 XT, so it’s ahead of its competitor in efficiency. Its Furmark power consumption was lower than the original RTX 4070’s, which was a little strange but could be due to optimizations in hardware or software. Power draw in Returnal was also a little high, approaching that of the RTX 4070 Ti, but only slightly above the slower AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT.Thermally, the Nvidia Founders Edition cooler performed well, keeping the card at a steady 56 degrees C while running Furmark and reaching a peak temp of 67 degrees C under Returnal.Verdict: An Exceptional Card, If Not Without RivalsThere’s absolutely no doubt that the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is a major step up from the original RTX 4070 that we reviewed last year. The new card delivers roughly 15% higher frame rates at the same $599 price, making its release a clear win for gamers.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
That said, while it’s an outstanding graphics card at its list price, the RTX 4070 Super isn’t quite powerful enough to wholly dominate its market segment. While we’d definitely call it the best $599 GPU, that doesn’t exclude its closest competitors from consideration.First, the non-Super GeForce RTX 4070 remains a more-than-satisfactory alternative at $549. Going strictly by list prices, I’d still opt for the Super, but any sort of sale or discount could bring the plain RTX 4070 down to the point where it presents a better value.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
More to the point, AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT stands as a formidable challenge to the RTX 4070 Super at five-sixths the price. Performance numbers varied between the archrivals, but for games that don’t support ray tracing, the Radeon is arguably the better deal. The Nvidia GPU reasserted itself in games that do support ray-tracing, with an edge reaching 30% in F1 22, but this advantage disappears when you enable FSR and DLSS. Though we think it would be wise for AMD to trim its RX 7800 XT price a bit due to that card’s lackluster ray-tracing performance, the RX 7800 XT remains a valid alternative to the RTX 4070 Super.In summary, the GeForce RTX 4070 Super is an excellent card, particularly when it comes to ray-tracing performance. It richly deserves our Editors’ Choice award. But it’s not unopposed; whether it deserves your dollars depends whether competing cards are on sale.
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