Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti review: a next-gen GPU that's worth the asking price?

Top-tier ray tracing experiences benchmarked.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Jan. 4, 2023

A trio of excellent ray tracing experiences are put through their paces on this second battery of ray tracing 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. Marvel's Spider-Man - this one is interesting in that not only does it push CPU and GPU hard, but VRAM allocation is of crucial important at 4K max settings - but the 12GB of memory in the RTX 4070 Ti seems to work just fine here, just as it does for the RTX 3080 Ti.

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

After the hiccup we had with Control, RTX 4070 Ti is back on track with Hitman 3, here tested with all of its ray tracing features enabled - RT shadows and reflections. We're seeing a convincing lead for the RTX 4070 Ti over the venerable RTX 3080 here, to the tune of 23 percent - higher than the MSRP differential between the two products. Meanwhile, it's back to business as usual with RDNA 3 comparisons as well: the RX 7900 XT has around 90 percent of the 4070 Ti's performance in this title, but its lowest one percent scores are considerably worse.

Switching things up to look at the Ada Lovelace comparisons, things look relatively predictable here - a 23 point lead for the RTX 4080, further cementing the lack of value in its launch MSRP - while the RTX 4090 is once again in another class entirely with a 73 percentage point lead. We're also seeing the 4070 Ti return to its position as a product that's almost as fast as the RTX 3090 Ti. That's remarkable bearing in mind the massive power requirements of the old Ti, not to mention its memory bus that's twice as wide.

HITMAN 3, ULTRA RT, DX12, TAA

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

The revised 4A Engine is built around ray tracing as a foundational concept for its stunning real-time global illumination system. A showcase technological achievement for the current generation of consoles only gets better on PC, where 4A doubles down on further visual fidelity - tessellation, hybrid RT reflections and more. While built to run well on AMD's RDNA 2, principally the current-gen consoles, the game is super-fast on Nvidia kit to the point where there's a huge 25 percentage point lead for the 4070 Ti over the RX 7900 XT - and it even beats XTX.

For many, the RTX 3080 is the litmus test for the new card and while the circa 19 percentage point lead is sizeable, it's not quite as high a boost as other titles we've seen. Correspondingly, when we stack up 4070 Ti against RTX 3090 Ti, the older card is some way ahead with a nine point lead. The RTX 4070 Ti still sneaks ahead of RTX 3090 though, so it's hardly a slouch! Performance differentials up against the other Ada Lovelace cards come in as expected - a circa 27 point lead for RTX 4080, rising to a huge 72 percent for the RTX 4090.

METRO EXODUS ENHANCED EDITION, ULTRA, DX12, TAA

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

We spent a lot of time looking at Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC, with our very own Alex Battaglia even suggesting improvements to the suite of ray tracing features that ensured PC users got a range of upgrades that scale way beyond the PlayStation 5 version of the game. This game is also exceptional in supporting DLSS, FSR2 and XeSS upscalers, in addition to Insomniac's own temporal injection system designed for consoles. While city-swinging can cause performance problems, this scene from FEAST HQ is very heavy on the GPU, but not quite as taxing in terms of CPU as outdoor scenes, making it a good test for graphics hardware.

Coming in with a 34 percentage point lead over the RTX 3080, Marvel's Spider-Man cements itself as a title that's super-heavy on VRAM with RT at its maximum settings, meaning that the 10 gigs in the old Ampere card isn't quite enough. The game is also relatively friendly to AMD hardware, meaning that RDNA 3 can put up a good fight against Nvidia here - 7900 XT edges ahead by three percent in this test.

Comparing the 4070 Ti to the other Nvidia juggernauts, we return to a situation where the 3090 Ti is still faster, but to such a small degree that you'd never be able to tell in the run of play. Scalability moving up the stack sees poorer returns for faster Ada Lovelace cards: a circa 22 point and 61 point lead for RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 respectively.