Nvidia RTX 4070 Super Review

1. Introduction2. Meet the RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Alan Wake II7. Assassin's Creed Mirage8. Cyberpunk 20779. Forza Horizon 510. The Last of Us Part 111. A Plague Tale: Requiem12. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart13. Red Dead Redemption 214. Resident Evil 415. Returnal16. Starfield17. Total War: Pharaoh18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing: Alan Wake II21. Ray Tracing: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora22. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207723. Ray Tracing: F1 2324. Ray Tracing: Hitman 325. Ray Tracing: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart26. Ray Tracing: Returnal27. Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider28. Ray Tracing Performance Summary29. DLSS Testing30. Clock Speed31. GPU Temperatures32. Memory Temperatures33. Acoustics34. Power Draw: 1080p35. Power Draw: 1440p36. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)37. Performance per Watt: 1080p38. Performance per Watt: 1440p39. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)40. Total System Power Draw41. Overclocking42. Closing Thoughts43. View All Pages

Hot on the heels of its announcement at CES 2024, today we can present our review of Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super GPU. Offering 22% more cores than the original RTX 4070 while arriving at the same price point, on paper this looks like an enticing refresh of what was already considered one of the better RTX 40-series GPUs. Today we find out if the 4070 Super is as good as it sounds, or whether or not there is more to the story…

Casting our minds back to April 2023 and the release of the RTX 4070, at the time we praised the GPU for its efficiency gains and decent performance at 1440p, but it's fair to say we weren't blown away by the generational gains on offer. Fast forward to today and Nvidia is claiming 15% better performance with the new RTX 4070 Super, and at the same price (£579/$599) to boot.

The increased core-count is more-or-less the only change, so if you were hoping for more VRAM or a wider memory interface on a xx70 SKU, then you will have to hold out for the RTX 4070 Ti Super that launches next week. For now though, we have tested the 4070 Super over twelve games, plus another eight with ray tracing, so let's find out how it got on…

If you want to read this review as a single page, click HERE.

	RTX 4090	RTX 4080	RTX 4070 Ti	RTX 4070 Super	RTX 4070
Process	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	TSMC N4
SMs	128	76	60	56	46
CUDA Cores	16384	9728	7680	7168	5888
Tensor Cores	512	304	240	224	184
RT Cores	128	76	60	56	46
Texture Units	512	304	240	224	184
ROPs	176	112	80	80	64
GPU Boost Clock	2520 MHz	2505 MHz	2610 MHz	2475 MHz	2475 MHz
Memory Data Rate	21 Gbps	22.4 Gbps	21 Gbps	21 Gbps	21 Gbps
L2 Cache	73729 KB	65536 KB	49152 KB	49152 KB	36864 KB
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	16GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface	384-bit	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1008 GB/Sec	716.8 GB/Sec	504 GB/Sec	504 GB/Sec	504 GB/Sec
TGP	450W	320W	285W	220W	200W

First, a quick spec recap. Just like the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070, the new 4070 Super uses a cut-down AD104 die, measuring 295mm². The fundamental building blocks are still the same of course, with the RTX 4070 Super offering a total of 56 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), each housing 256 CUDA Cores, for a total of 7168. We also find 56 RT cores, 224 Tensor cores, 224 Texture Units, and 80 ROPs.

TSMC's N4 node has Nvidia cranking up the clock speed significantly this generation, with the RTX 4070 Super sporting the same 2475MHz rated boost clock as the original model. That's still 135MHz slower than the rated clock speed of the RTX 4070 Ti, but we would expect GPU Boost to push things further still.

The memory configuration also remains the same as both the 4070 and 4070 Ti. That means a relatively narrow 192-bit memory interface, so even with 12GB GDDR6X running at 21Gbps, total memory bandwidth comes in at 504 GB/s, lower than the RTX 3070 Ti. That said, there has been a substantial upgrade to the L2 cache with the Ada architecture, with the RTX 4070 now offering 49.1MB, compared to just 6MB for GA102.

Considering the increased core-count, power draw is naturally a touch higher than the RTX 4070, with the 4070 Super boasting a 220W TGP. This is something we focus on closely in this review, using our enhanced GPU power testing methodology, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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