Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review: more frames for less money

Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Jan. 16, 2024

So far, so super. The proliferation of ray tracing in both RT and upscaling tests effectively leaves AMD for dust - but now it's time to move onto rasterisation, where we expect Team Red to deliver far more impressive results, making the case for its latest RDNA 3 cards as raster value champions.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our 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.

Control

As the 'Corridor of Doom' is such a demanding area of Remedy's Control, we've relocated our rasterisation benchmark to the same area because it turns out that it's not the RT element that makes this place so demanding - it's inherent to the corridor whether you're running RT or not.

Control's status as a banana skin game for Ada Lovelace continues as the RTX 4070 Super can barely exceed RTX 3080 or RX 7800 XT performance, while sitting at a mid-point between RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti (OK, so maybe a little closer to the Ti). It's results like this where AMD's strong performance and 16GB of memory start to make the decision to buy a little more challenging.

Control, High, 4x MSAA

Cyberpunk 2077

It's almost a shame to play Cyberpunk without upscaling and ray tracing, given how transformative these technologies can be - especially with frame generation and path tracing on RTX 40-series hardware - but it does at least level the playing field for AMD, with the much cheaper, more memory-heavy RX 7800 XT outperforming the RTX 4070 Super.

Again, comparisons with the RTX 3080 aren't massively compelling - there's only a slight lead. Meanwhile, a 23 percentage point lead over the RTX 4070 is impressive, which translates into circa 91 to 92 percent of the 4070 Ti's prowess.

Cyberpunk 2077, Ultra, TAA

Forza Horizon 5

We return to Forza Horizon 5 in perhaps its most natural configuration: RT disabled with native rendering for the best mixture of fine detail and performance. It's curious to note that there's a six to seven point gap in favour of the RTX 4070 Super vs RX 7800 XT at 1440p resolution, but this seems to vanish completely at 4K.

Meanwhile, we're back to impressive gains up against RTX 3080, a double-digit lead over the vanilla RTX 4070 and the circa five percent difference up against the RTX 4070 Ti is barely noticeable in standard play... at 1440p, at least. At 4K, the Ti is way ahead.

Forza Horizon 5, Extreme, 4x MSAA

F1 22

F1 22 is a legitimate esports title often played on high refresh rate displays, so even with averages in the hundreds of frames per second, having a powerful enough graphics card can be impactful - and here, the advantages from AMD evaporate at 1440p and even 4K. Both cards are evenly matched.

The spectre of the RTX 3080 continues to haunt the 70-class Ada cards, with the 4070 Super barely ahead of the Ampere classic, while the card continues to handily outperform its vanilla counterpart while remaining within spitting distance of the existing Ti model.