okay let's do this reviewing the RTX
4070 is kind of a no-win situation for
me because on the one hand everyone is furious about the unaffordability of
modern gpus and rightly so but on the
other hand I have to acknowledge that this is the best value proposition that
we've seen in years then on the other other hand there's the fact that NVIDIA
who controls all of this appears to be making this product look like a good
value by simply making all of their other ones a terrible value I really do
wish I could just sit this one out because by the time I'm done at least
some of you will have misdirected your anger toward me the messenger but here
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simple clicks check them out at the link down below looking at the specs alone
the RTX 4070 is pretty underwhelming at
just 295 millimeters squared this is the smallest 70 class GPU that we've seen
since the GTX 770 and with the same Cuda
core count as the RTX 3070 this is the
first time ever that NVIDIA hasn't given us more shaders generation over
generation but but wait wait not out there are some things to get excited
about here um boost clocks have risen a whopping 43
compared to the RTX 3070 and the change
to 12 gigabytes of gddr6x memory is a
welcome upgrade it's we continue to watch vram usage in modern games go from
unreasonable to downright idiotic to
quantify our excitement then the lab performed a whopping 984 tests across 11
gpus with CPUs from both Intel and AMD
we're going to have links down below they even threw in the Intel rk770 for
funsies now 1080p performance in rasterized games might seem kind of
irrelevant for an Enthusiast tier GPU these days but for many competitive
Gamers High frame rates are way more important than high resolution and if
you're one of them the RTX 4070 is proper quick with performance Landing
within two percent of the RTX 380. this
might not be the leap forward that you were hoping for but given the pricing of
even second hand 3080s it's kind of
looking like a w kind of give me a sec at 1440p the story
Remains the Same with the 4070 neck and neck with the RTX 3080 but what really
stood out to us here at both of these resolutions is how flipping fast AMD's
last gen has gotten thanks to their ongoing software updates the 6800 XT now
enjoys a small lead over the 3080 with
the 7900 XT coming in a whole 40 percent
faster than the 4070 and nearly matching
the RTX 4080 a GPU that costs 400 more
then at 4K the 4070s W gets even more
twisted and complex because outside of Forza the RTX 3080 ends up outrunning it
by anywhere from 5 to 19 percent
or at least it does until you turn on Ray tracing where the Gap Narrows
significantly now the story NVIDIA wants to focus on here is not how the 4070
beats last gen by 25 to 30 percent but
rather on how it convincingly destroys the GTX 1080. from my point of view
though beating a seven-year-old card is not the most incredible of Feats unless
you name zintel it's just obvious that NVIDIA is bringing this up because they
recognize the generation over generation upgrade it's not that big and they hope
that it's all you Pascal owners out there that are finally gonna bite the
bullet and upgrade moving on to productivity in our benchmarks there was
one standout in Photoshop the Intel Arc
a770 was able to best not only the 4070
but also the 4070 TI and was even within
spitting distance of the RTX 4080 I mean I'm not sure that the average user
updating their Tinder profile is going to notice but whatever Hardware
acceleration Intel built for Arc definitely works then outside of
Photoshop Arc returns to its rightful place at the bottom of the stack and the
rest of the story remains largely the same as gaming with the RTX 3080 and
4070 Trading Places depending on the exact workload and AMD once again
showing off that fine line driver development
outside of blender which remains a sore spot for team red the 6800 XT put on an
amazing show winning more titles than it lost at a lower price
so if we're looking at the performance of an RTX 3080 but at the price of an
RTX 370 TI given how crap GPU prices
have been for the last couple of years this is great right well yes but saying
an RTX 4070 for 600 is better than an
RTX 3080 for like what would it Peak at 1600 or something like that that's like
saying that a paddle to the ass is better than a slap to the face
both can be fun when the kids are out of town and we do have matching couples undies
on lttstore.com by the way to make this even more awkward but none of that is
the point the point is that when compared to last gen sure NVIDIA gave us
a solid increase in performance but they
also gave us an equally solid increase in price and this is the second time in
two generations that they've pulled this move when we went from the 1000 series
to the 2000 series they did the same thing we got a nearly proportional
increase in both price and performance with NVIDIA hoarding the benefits of
their new architecture and using them to line their own Pockets rather than
passing them along to the consumer you see the industry Norm has been that as
our manufacturing technology improves the same amount of compute becomes less
expensive in this case NVIDIA went from
Samsung's 8 nanometer node to tsmc N5
that's how they packed the same number of Cuda cores into just 295 millimeters
squared compared to the 392 millimeter square die of the 3070 which is super
cool but then if it supposedly didn't cost
any less why the heck did they even bother well there are two reasons for
that efficiency and then probably more
importantly the RTX 4090 but let's talk
efficiency first for the amount of performance that the
RTX 470 delivers it sips power it has a
tgp of 200 Watts but NVIDIA says that
the average gaming power draw is more like 184 and in our testing that was
basically bang on which is darn impressive given that the performance
comparable RTX 3080 Drew an average of 296 Watts during the same test also a
good sign is that the maximum recorded wattage of the 4070 was just 233 watts
compared to a whopping 412 for the 3080.
so not only will you be saving money on your monthly Energy bill but you also
don't have to worry about a power Spike sending your aging power supply into the
shadow Realm now you might be hoping that this means there's a lot of
Headroom for overclocking but sadly it looks like NVIDIA has really locked this
card down and we weren't able to meaningfully improve performance by tinkering with any of the knobs and
dials I don't think that the sufficiency gain is why NVIDIA decided to go tsmc 5n
though and it might actually have been better for consumers if they just took
everything they learned about the mature eight nanometer Samsung node and then
made better gpus with it kind of like what they did back in 2014 using the
same 28 nanometer node for both the GTX 770 and 970. the issue though is if they
had done that the RTX 4090 simply
wouldn't have been feasible it would have drawn too much power and it would
have given AMD an opportunity to have a competitive Flagship which would be
utterly unacceptable the 4090 is a true generational leap
coming in at just seven percent more cost than the 3090 while being over 50
faster so then why the heck isn't that true of the rest
of the lineup NVIDIA well because from their point of view
they did give you a generational performance leap but through AI rather
than raw Grunt and In fairness they aren't entirely wrong here by turning on
dlss3 frame generation the RTX 4070 is
able to easily dispatch the RTX 3080 and
even deliver performance about on par with the 4080 before its AI assistance
is kicked in now frame generation may increase input
latency but NVIDIA reflex does go a long
way towards bringing it back down is it as good as Simply Having a faster GPU
and not using any of these tricks that's a topic for another video sadly
our Labs team really does need to do things like sleep even if it's in their
tents adding to NVIDIA's argument currently there are dozens of games that support
DLS S3 and the list is rapidly expanding so you might as well just turn it on but
detracting from NVIDIA's argument there are also tens of thousands of games that
do not support dlss3 and will perform better on the 6800 XT making the 4070s
position more precarious is the fact that pricing of 30 70s and 3080s on eBay
has been in free fall Pro tip by the way don't use buy it now because auctions
have been completing literally a hundred dollars lower now it's worth noting that the 4070 has
some non-gaming generational advantages it's new so it'll have driver support
for longer and it comes with a warranty and it features av1 encoding and
decoding which is genuinely great and as a bonus this thing has been shockingly
stable for being so early in its life cycle AMD could learn a thing or two
this is a really good product but that doesn't mean that we are unreservedly
happy about it NVIDIA is whining about how they simply can't pass along any
silicon cost savings just doesn't hold a ton of water
development costs for new process nodes have increased substantially but I also
think that NVIDIA does have some room to move here if everyone else's pricing is
anything to go by one day Arc will save us
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