The launch of the RTX 50 series has been plagued by
underwhelming performance, low stock, and black screening drivers.
And to top it off, NVIDIA is embroiled in yet another power connector scandal
on their flagship RTX 5090 Founders Edition.
At this point, I wouldn't even blame them for saying, you know what?
Screw it. Let's not even make a 5070 Ti Founders Edition.
Eh, whaaat? They didn't make one.
Nope. NVIDIA has left their most affordable 50 series yet
in the hands of their board partners who did their best with it.
But if you guys were hoping that the 50 series story would get better
as we made our way down to the cards that more folks can afford,
well, I've got news for you.
The good news is that the 5070 Ti is a significantly more compelling product
than the 5080. But that assumes that anyone can get it at MSRP.
And that's the bad news. No one's going to be getting it at MSRP.
But you know what you will get at MSRP is this segue to our sponsor.
The 5070 Ti sits in kind of a weird place. It arguably has the chops for 4K gaming.
But in our opinion, the sweet spot for it is high refresh rate 1440P gaming
or very high refresh rate like Esports 1080P gaming.
Let's start with the latter. In Alan Wake, the 5070 Ti manages a 9% uplift over the 4070 Ti Super
but then loses to AMD's aging 7900XT.
In F124, the 5070 Ti inches a bit closer to pole position
and gets closer still in sci-fi roguelike Returnal.
In our Vulcan test, Red Dead Redemption 2, we see the 5070 Ti finally surpassed the 7900XT
but it's not until we look at Cyberpunk where we see a result that meets the technical definition of a lead, albeit barely.
With that said, thanks to its much better 1% lows, the 5070 Ti tops our charts in the last of us Part 1
and properly beats Team Red in Black Myth Wukong.
Across our suite of games then, we see the 5070 Ti pull off a serviceable 15% lead over its last gen counterpart
but we also see it demonstrate clearly why NVIDIA wishes that everyone would just forget
that that card was replaced by a more super variant just over a year ago.
It surpasses that card by only 9%.
Of course, at 1080p, it's easy for a card this powerful to end up CPU bottlenecked.
So let's push some more pixels to get a better idea of where the 5070 Ti sits in the product stack.
Right out of the gate, it manages a measurably better improvement
over the last gen Super at 1440p and what?
A 10% is a measurably more than 9?
But even then, it still fails to break away from Team Red's 7900 sandwich,
which further illustrates just how disappointing this generation is for gamers.
Typically, we would expect a new 70-class GPU to beat
or at least match the last generation's 80 series.
But now, not even the 70 Ti can stand up to the last gen 80 card.
That kinda sucks. Unless you have a 4080, in which case, hey, NVIDIA just saved you a lot of money.
Maybe it makes up for it in ray tracing, though. And, well, hey, it compares much more favorably to AMD here,
whose 7000 series RT capabilities are more like two generations behind NVIDIA,
but we are still looking at a meh uplift over the 4070 Ti Super.
I mean, if you wanna crank the iCandy without upscaling at 1080,
the 5070 Ti delivers a great gaming experience outside of the notoriously demanding Blacksmith.com,
but 1080p Ultra used to cost, like, 300 bucks, not 750 bucks.
The good news is that 1440p ray tracing puts the 5070 Ti in its biggest lead over last gen so far.
A 13%!
If you pretend that the Super doesn't exist, the 5070 Ti does provide decent generational uplift.
But the non-Super that NVIDIA wants us to compare it to was mocked for its dismal value proposition,
and given that I have supers in my warehouse right now,
it's clear that NVIDIA's operation chronos failed superly.
So why isn't NVIDIA's new 50 series Blackwell much better?
Well, for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that it's manufactured on the same 4N process node as its predecessor,
and makes relatively light changes to the underlying architecture compared to last gen.
We get lightly improved ray tracing or RT cores, moderately improved tensor cores for AI,
and, this one is key, seemingly unimproved CUDA cores, which do the bulk of the work in traditional rendering.
The main step forward seems to be better integration between the AI and the rendering course for the sake of future
neural rendering technology that demos admittedly very well right now,
but it's going to take time to see widespread adoption in games you can play.
With all of that said, Blackwell cards do get some pretty big improvements that don't show up on the FPS charts.
The media engine for encoding and streaming is capable of significantly higher quality.
DP 2.1 UHBR20 connectors at the back allow these monsters to drive 4K displays at up to 240Hz without compression.
And the jump to GDDR7 memory means that our VRAM is now one greater than six.
What? Oh no! It must have heard me say neural rendering!
Hide! DLSS4 with multi-frame gen is coming!
And it's coming in hot! I'm talking over 150 frames per second in Cyberpunk at 4K with ray tracing set to Ultra.
Dang! And we get improved image quality over previous generations of DLSS.
Our frames look closer to native rendering thanks to the new transformer-based AI upscaling model,
and the new tensor cores can generate as many as three AI-generated frames for every truly rendered frame,
leaving less AI endowed last-gen cards in the dust.
Too bad it comes with numerous downsides, like lowering your base frame rate,
only really feeling good when that base frame rate is already high enough to be playable,
and introducing weird anomalies. Like any tool, it does have its uses,
but don't imagine that it's a magic fix, no matter how much NVIDIA wants you to believe that it is.
Of course, that doesn't mean the 5070 Ti is a slow card.
For funsies, we got the good folks in the lab wearing their super awesome
LTT Labs merch from LTTstore.com to drag-race the 5070 Ti in 4K against its bigger brother,
the RTX 5080, resulting in probably the best argument for this card that we've seen yet.
Obviously it's slower, it's a lower-end card, but the value is much better against a card that is
sold out everywhere, and it's got the same 16GB of VRAM, making both cards likely to be
similarly future...probable? I don't want to say proof.
Our ASUS Prime card features a triple-fan cooler that uses a flow-through design.
It's a little thicker than two slots, but it isn't any wider or taller than the 5080 FE,
and it managed to keep this 300-watt card at around 70 degrees in both F124 and in combuster.
In our power tests, while we did see a transient spike as high as 360 watts,
overall the card seems well-behaved as it pulls roughly 9% more power than the 4070 Ti
to deliver your sweet, sweet FPS. For power delivery, ASUS uses the scandalous
connector that's been making headlines for melting on Founder's Edition 5090s,
but the lower power draw here, by half, means that melting cables shouldn't...be an issue.
On an unrelated note, when's the last time you checked your smoke alarm?
The 5070 Ti is clearly a gaming-focused product, but we like to take a look at productivity anyway,
and we were unsurprised to find that the biggest generational uplift is in, you guessed it, AI.
With most of our benchmarks seeing substantial improvements over last gen,
and especially over the competition from AMD, while the models that you can run will be limited by
your mere 16GB of VRAM, you're no more limited than you would be on a 5080.
Cool card, that one. As for 3D modeling, don't expect much of an improvement,
and for video editing, the new card proves capable, if not sensational, with very similar
performance to the 5080. Just note, though, that the 70 Ti has one fewer decoder engine compared
to its bigger brother, so for a very large multicam setup, for instance, you could overburden it
and end up putting additional strain on your CPU. Alright, with that out of the way,
what's the conclusion for this thing? Well, it's complicated. If you spent $599 for a 2070 Super
way back in the day, you might be happy to spend $150 more than you did last time on a 5070 Ti
that nets you over two and a half times the performance, and that's a totally valid perspective,
so why are reviewers so pissed off about this thing, and the 50 series in general?
Well, it's because at one point, you could wait that same six years, and the card that you upgraded
to would be over three times as good for essentially the same nominal price, and then if you factored
in inflation, it would technically be cheaper. Not to mention that these new cards here can't even
be bought at those advertised prices for reasons that seem to mostly come down to NVIDIA prioritizing
their AI customers and their shareholders over gamers. So yeah, I'm mad because for the first
time in my lifetime, the trend of more powerful hardware being available to more people, driving
a boom in access to information and economic opportunity, that trend seems to be going in
reverse. Maybe AMD's Radeon team can save us? Yeah, I don't know if I'm hopeful, but I'm hoping,
hoping to tell you about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out our 5090
review? Obviously, that's not a card most people can afford, but it goes into a little bit more
detail about the Blackwell architecture and all the benefits it has over the last gen.