We took ASUS’ GeForce RTX 4070 Ti from the ROG STRIX series for a round of performance tests. Is the most advanced model worth your money? How does it compare to the competition with a recent NVIDIA driver? We checked and came back with answers for you
Introduction and introduction to the product
We covered NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti when it hit the market earlier this year. Now we have landed another model from the manufacturer ASUS from its most advanced series, and this is an excellent opportunity to refresh the performance results using drivers in the latest version to see where we have progressed and how much the balance of power has changed in the high-end market of video cards, at least among those we discuss in this review.
The ROG STRIX is ASUS’ most advanced and luxurious series of graphics cards, and is sometimes notorious for the high price tag it carries. These versions usually also carry the most efficient coolers you will find among video cards on the market. The RTX 4070 Ti is usually priced at about NIS 4,000. You will usually pay over NIS 5,000 for this model in stores.
This RTX 4070 Ti looks and feels like an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 simply because it uses a cooler the size of one of those, and therefore has the impressive dimensions of 33.6 centimeters in length, 15 centimeters in height and 6.3 centimeters or 3 slots in thickness.
This graphics card contains the ASUS STRIX cooling with three fans and 6 copper pipes.
This video card contains five display interfaces, which is one more than we are used to seeing in NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series. Support for 5 screens has not been opened here, as we are still limited by the architecture to only four. Although, there is a little more flexibility in the nature of the array of screens that can be connected thanks to the addition of HDMI. The HDMI ports in the RTX 40 series have won the new 2.1a standard, so there is a very nice advantage here. There is no problem driving an 8K120Hz screen through this interface.
The back of the ROG STRIX contains a plate that keeps and cools the hot components of the printed circuit board, while there is a part where there is no printed circuit board but only cooling and where one of the fans takes out hot air from the back of the video card.
As befits every video card in the GeForce RTX 40 series, here too we meet the “lovable” power connector which is 12VHPWR. In the box you get an adapter between a pair of standard PCI-Express 8PIN connectors and this connector.
A nice feature that you don’t often come across is that this video card is able to connect two controlled fans. It is possible to adjust their control through ASUS software such as ASUS GPU TWEAK III.
At your disposal, some technical information before diving into the performance tests. NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is the third graphics card in the new RTX 40 series, and has the AD104 graphics core which is the smallest so far at 295 square millimeters.
This graphics core is manufactured in the advanced N4 process of the TSMC factory in Taiwan and is based on NVIDIA’s Ada architecture, which contains by a large margin the highest amount of transistors per area that we have seen in any graphics core so far. The AD104 has 35.8 billion transistors in total.
This graphics card contains 7,680 CUDA processors for general rendering and rendering tasks, working with 80 application engines. This video card of course also supports RayTracing with the use of 60 dedicated processors. There are also 240 Tensor processors for machine learning tasks.
The graphic core is set to work at a maximum frequency of 2,760MHz, but in practice it can climb even higher if the operating temperature and power consumption allow it. This is part of NVIDIA’s Turbo Boost function for its graphics cards.
The RTX 4070 Ti has 12GB of GDDR6X graphics memory. This is memory that is produced exclusively for NVIDIA at Micron factories. This memory runs on a modest 192BIT bandwidth for an effective memory traffic of 504.2GB per second, about half the traffic and volume you’ll encounter on the RTX 4090.
The examination system and the performance tests
- Intel Core i9 13900K processor
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z790 HERO motherboard
- Cooling for the processor Noctua NH-D15 Chromax.Black
- Kingston Renegade Fury 2TB NVMe storage
- ASUS ROG THOR 1200W Platinum power supply
- Memory G.Skill Trident Z5 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30
The test systems use the Windows 11 operating system with the latest update of the second half of 2022, and the most updated drivers for all tested video cards. ReBAR through the BIOS is enabled for all graphics cards.
We tested the video cards in WQHD 2560X1440 and 4K UHD 3840X2160 resolutions, which are two of the most common resolutions among gamers in the high end market. The graphs in blue represent 1440P and the graphs in green represent 4K.
With fresh drivers we set out to test several games. In Overwatch 2, the RTX 4070 Ti’s performance is a bit lower than what we saw with the competing RX 7900 XT.
In the Borderlands 3 game, the RX 7900 XT was the fastest among the three video cards we tested, and by quite a significant margin against the RTX 4070 Ti.
In Call of Duty MW2 the numbers are still on AMD’s side. The RTX 4070 Ti was pretty close, but at a disadvantage.
In the racing game Dirt 5 the RTX 4070 Ti lags behind the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XT quite noticeably as well. The performance at 1440p is high settings allowing to enjoy above 120FPS nevertheless.
In Horizon Zero Dawn the RTX 4070 Ti performs much closer than in other titles, but is still about 10 percent behind that of the RX 7900 XT on average.
In Plague Tale you can see that the modest hardware composition of the RTX 4070 Ti leaves it respectably behind what the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XT can provide.
In Tomb Raider you can see the RTX 4070 Ti about ten percent behind the RX 7900 XT and about 25 percent behind the RTX 4080.
In the Watch Dogs Legion game, we saw the RTX 4070 Ti placed about 15 percent behind the RX 7900 XT and the RTX 4080.
A small ray of light for the RTX 4070 Ti’s performance comes in the form of RayTracing performance compared to the RX 7900 XT in Cyberpunk 2077, where we saw it perform about 8 percent better.
In terms of power consumption, the RTX 4070 Ti consumes less than 300W and in principle any modern system with a power supply of 750W or more from a recognized brand will be sufficient for it. 850W to be safe will be fine.
ASUS cooling unsurprisingly does an outstanding job. With an operating frequency of almost 2,900MHz for the graphics core throughout the effort, and with fans at a speed of only 33 percent, the video card remained quiet and the operating temperature for the graphics core was 65 degrees Celsius at most, and 76.3 degrees for the hottest point. We are 20 degrees away from any concern, and the fans are barely making an effort.
Analysis of the performance tests and summary
Starting from the state of the RTX 4070 Ti today. We don’t have much to add beyond what our performance tests showed in nine modern games. The RTX 4070 Ti is sometimes far behind the RTX 4080 and a bit behind AMD’s RX 7900 XT.
With the stabilization of prices and supply of products in the market, the RTX 4070 Ti is reaching a situation where users are going to decide between it and the RX 7900 XT and it seems that the status quo is the same as it was a few weeks ago – as long as RayTracing is not used, the preference seems to go towards the RX 7900 XT that consistently manages to produce better performance, mind you.
The RX 7900 XT launched when it was about 10 percent more expensive than the RTX 4070 Ti and that gave it some breathing room. AMD has recently started to lower the prices of its graphics cards with the RX 7900 XT dropping from $900 to $800. The effect is not yet visible in the local market, but we think it will not be long in coming.
This puts the RTX 4070 Ti in a bit of an unpleasant spot, but NVIDIA has some lifelines for this product. There is the use of Tensor kernels for machine learning, which is something that a lot of people today are getting into. There is healthy RayTracing performance and there are all kinds of sweets that NVIDIA likes to give to its products, such as the RTX video AI upsampling that came into vogue very recently, a tool that allows viewing of video content that, through algorithms, will try to improve quality and resolution.
For the specific ASUS model, we think that those who have a long-term familiarity with the hardware world know that STRIX models are mainly intended for crazy people to talk about. It would be hard for us to convince you that a 10 percent price increase over the TUF model would be justified, as ASUS’ recent TUF graphics cards deliver simply superior cooling performance that makes us ask “why would anyone pay more?”.
You can give ASUS points for the design, the RGB lights and the excessive heatsink. The RTX 4070 Ti is definitely an outlier in the graphics card landscape. We hope that NVIDIA will answer the competition in the near future in the form of a price reduction to make this model more affordable against AMD’s serious competition.