Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review: an RTX 3080 challenger for $599

A solid 1440p upgrade - but Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive hints at something more.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on April 12, 2023

A trio of excellent ray tracing experiences are put through their paces on this second battery of RT tests. Hitman 3 looks great even without RT, but IO Interactive pushes realism to the next level with a range of ultra-demanding ray tracing features. Meanwhile, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition remains the first - and only - triple-A gaming experience to be released requiring a GPU capable of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. We've swapped out Marvel's Spider-Man for its Miles Morales upgrade, which adds RT shadows to the game's already impressive list of ray tracing features.

To reiterate if you're jumping straight to this page without looking at prior results, our benchmarking system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Hitman 3

IO Interactive's ray tracing implementation for Hitman 3 turned out to be far heavier on the GPU than we had imagined, though their actual utility is a bit of a mixed bag: RT reflections added to the experience, while the RT shadows didn't particularly impress us, especially when considering the performance implications. Even so, the Dubai stage of the game proves to be an interesting benchmark. Curiously, at 1440p, our results show the 4070 much closer to the RTX 3080 than prior tests, though differences are more pronounced at 1080p and especially 4K.

There's clear water up against the RTX 3070 though, with a big 30 percentage point lead and so by extension, the older 70-series cards are way behind - there's a doubling of performance up against the RTX 2070 Super, and if you're upgrading from a vintage 2018 RTX 2070, a 2.4x multiplier in frame-rates. It may be worth pointing out that the base RTX 2070 is broadly comparable in performance terms to today's RTX 3060 - currently the number one most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware survey.

Hitman, Ultra, Full RT

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

4A Games' revised version of its excellent action adventure shooter remains the only triple-A title that demands the use of a graphics card that allows for the use of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Not even the 'fallback' support for RT Nvidia added to 10-series Pascal cards works on this one! Our test sequence is the beginning of the demanding Taiga stage and for our test suite revamp, we've moved up from ultra to extreme settings, while retaining the ultra RT preset.

We're looking at the RTX 4070 once again nipping at the heels of the RTX 3080. The older card remains faster but not to any really noticeable degree during gameplay - our tests show it running around four percent faster. As the game was designed to be run well on the consoles using AMD hardware, it's no surprise to see the RX 6800 XT perform relatively well here - it's a touch faster than the 3070, though the 4070 delivers a 25 percentage point advantage.

Via DLSS you can achieve a perfectly good 1440p Metro experience on the RTX 20-series Turing cards, but in benchmark conditions at this resolution there's still a game-changing 1.9x improvement to frame-rates, rising to a a nigh-on 2.1x boost to owners of the older RTX 2070.

Metro Exodus Enhanced, Extreme, Ultra RT, Nvidia Features Off

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Thus far, a narrative has emerged showing that the RTX 4070 offers RTX 3080-class performance... almost. The card seems to fall short a touch by varying degress, depending on the title. However, scaling with Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is interesting - at 1440p, the incremental boosts to performance moving between the RTX 40-series line is lower than expected - a 4090 is only 65 percent faster than the 4070. The scaling improves at 4K, so perhaps it is a CPU constraint.

On the flip-side, base performance is still very high and this is where we see our first conclusive win for the RTX 4070 over the RTX 3080, with a remarkable 14 point lead in favour of the new card. This has the knock-on effect of making the new offering almost 45 points ahead of the RTX 3070, and 30 percent to the better against the RX 6800 XT, which typically runs the Spider-Man RT set-up very well.

Interestingly though, there are no surprises when stacking up the new card against older offerings - a 2.1x performance boost over the RTX 2070 Super, rising to 2.4x over the RTX 2070.