Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super review: a new 4K/1440p contender

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

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Jan. 24, 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. This is emphasised by the fact that at both 1440p and 4K, RTX 3090 is in the same ballpark now as the 4070 Ti Super. The big gains have all gone.

This also means that AMD is back in the game - the RX 7900 XT is seven to 10 percent faster, depending on whether you're looking at 1440p or 2160p metrics. Meanwhile, a six percentage point advantage over the outgoing RTX 4070 Ti leaves us impassive while the RTX 4080 is miles ahead at either 21 or 23 percentage points. The 'banana skin' game strikes again!

Control, High, 4x MSAA

Cyberpunk 2077

It's almost a shame to play Cyberpunk without upscaling, ray tracing or even path tracing at this class of hardware 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. The much cheaper, more memory-heavy RX 7900 XT outperforms the RTX 4070 Ti Super by over 27 percent. Again, the RTX 3090 is now back on nigh-on level terms with the new card.

It's a similar story to Control when we look at the differentials between RTX 4070 Ti non-Super and RTX 4080 - just a four to five percent lead for the new card over its non-Super predecessor, while the higher-end RTX 4080 is over 25 percent to the better.

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, performance and that signature 4x MSAA. And it's back to winning ways for the 4070 Ti Super... to a certain extent. The 21 to 22 point advantage vs 3090 isn't to be sniffed at!

However, that's very much down to the Ada architecture, so differentials against the outgoing RTX 4070 Ti only amount to around five to seven percent overall - unimpressive. That said, you'll note that RTX 4080 is hardly a power player here with its own miserly wins against the 4070 Ti Super - a mere five to percent depending on resolution. The RX 7900 XT does well, but doesn't come out on top, with 4070 Ti Super a good 13 to 14 percentage points 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, AMD's RX 7900 XT pushes ahead of the 4070 Ti Super - but only by single digits, however.

The gaps between the 70-class Ada cards and RTX 4080 close up at resolutions lower than 4K - presumably because a good deal of the extended benchmark run may well be CPU-limited.