RTX 4070 vs 4070 Ti: Nvidia's latest graphics cards battle for gamers' respect

An Asus RTX 4070 Ti and an Nvidia RTX 4070 against a two toned blue background
(Image credit: Future)
Where to buy RTX 4070

Several RTX 4070 graphics cards against a green background with a TechRadar Don't Miss badge

(Image credit: Future)

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Now that the Nvidia RTX 4070 has launched, gamers have a genuine midrange graphics card of the Lovelace and RDNA 3 generations to clammor for, and they are definitely justified in doing so.

In my Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review, I found that the RTX 4070 went toe to toe with both the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and put up some genuinely impressive numbers. From creative workload performance to high-end, 4K gaming, the RTX 4070 is a surprisingly powerful graphics card hiding in a fairly modest dual-slot GPU housing.

However, the RTX 4070 wasn't the best graphics card I got to throw on my test bench this month. I spend well over 100 hours total testing all of the current gen GPUs to see how the RTX 4070 stacked up, and while the 4070 put up an admirable fight across the board, there was one card especially that had its number, it seemed: The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

This shouldn't be a surprise, as the RTX 4070 Ti has some significantly beefier hardware, but once the dust has settled from all that benchmarking, I've come to realize that the RTX 4070 Ti isn't as straight a win as it might seem, and there are plenty of buyers out there who are going to be genuinely torn between two of the best Nvidia graphics cards on the market currently.

Fortunately, I was taking notes during all that benchmarking, and so I'm here to break down the pluses-and-minuses of both the Nvidia RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti so you have as much information about the expected performance of these two cards as possible before you click submit your order for either one.

Nvidia RTX 4070 vs RTX 4070 Ti: Price

An Nvidia RTX 4070 next to an Asus RTX 4070 Ti

(Image credit: Future)

This is, fortunately, one of the easier categories to measure, at least on a surface level.

The Nvidia RTX 4070 has an MSRP of $599, which converts to about £525 or AU$870. This is a 20% price increase over the $499 MSRP of the Nvidia RTX 3070 launched at the end of 2020, and while nobody can claim this is a good thing, it's worth noting that the RTX 4070 isn't the only card seeing its prices rise.

The Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, for example, has an MSRP of $799 (about £680 / AU$1,160), which is about 25% more expensive than the $599 MSRP of the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti. In that sense, the RTX 4070 wins out somewhat for getting too big of a price increase, relatively speaking.

More importantly though, both of these cards need to be evaluated based on their value to the consumer, that is to say: how much performance are you getting for the money you are spending? While I won't spoil the upcoming performance section on that front, I will say that both the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti offer the best and third-best performance-per-dollar value, respectively, of any of the cards I tested recently, which goes a long way to accepting the higher prices being charged.

  • Winner: Nvidia RTX 4070

Nvidia RTX 4070 vs RTX 4070 Ti: Design

The RTX 4070 logo etched into the trim of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

There are really only three major design points that matter when looking at the RTX 4070 vs 4070 Ti: namely that the RTX 4070 Ti does not have a Founders Edition, so what design you ultimately get for the RTX 4070 Ti will depend entirely on the manufacturer you decide to buy it from. 

The second point being that the Nvidia's Founders Edition RTX 4070 packs in a remarkable amount of power inside a card no bigger than the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. 

And finally that with a TGP of just 200W, the Nvidia RTX 4070 could have just ditched the 16-pin adapter entirely and gone with an 8-pin and it still would have gotten the power it needed to the card itself. 

  • Winner: Nvidia RTX 4070

Nvidia RTX 4070 vs RTX 4070 Ti: Performance

An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card slotted into a motherboard

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
My test bench specs

Here is the systems I used to test the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU Cooler: Cougar Poseidon GT 360 AIO Cooler
DDR5 RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum @ 5,200MHz & 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo @ 5,200MHz
Motherboard: ASRock X670E Taichi
SSD: Samsung 980 Pro SSD @ 1TB
Power Supply: Corsair AX1000 80-Plus Titanium (1000W) Case: Praxis Wetbench

Ultimately, which card you decide to buy is going to come down to which one gives you the performance you need at the lowest cost, and given that both of these cards are near-ish in price, the extra performance you can get out of the RTX 4070 Ti really weighs heavy in this round.

In synthetic performance, the RTX 4070 Ti consistently scores about 22-25% better than the RTX 4070, with some notable exceptions like Nightraid and PassMark 3D DirectX which temper the overall average a bit so that the RTX 4070 Ti ends up with about 16% better performance than the RTX 4070.

This isn't surprising given the greater number of stream multiprocessors on the RTX 4070 Ti, along with more RT and tensor cores that go with them.

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Synthetic Performance
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
3DMark Firestrike (1080p)44,28854,88223.92%
3DMark Nightraid (1080p)179,557184,1832.58%
3DMark Speedway (1440p)4,4545,45722.52%
3DMark Port Royal (1440p)11,15414,25627.81%
3DMark Time Spy (1440p)17,77823,01829.48%
3DMark Firestrike Extreme (1440p)21,48227,22326.73%
3DMark Time Spy Extreme (2160p)8,54111,09129.85%
3DMark Firestrike Ultra (2160p)10,03713,56835.17%
3DMark Wildlife Extreme (2160p)36,00846,25128.45%
3DMark Wildlife Extreme Unlimited (2160p)35,34345,99130.13%
PassMark 3D DirectX Test34,91340,61016.32%
Row 12 - Cell 0 Row 12 - Cell 1 Row 12 - Cell 2 Row 12 - Cell 3
Row 13 - Cell 0 Row 13 - Cell 1 Row 13 - Cell 2 Row 13 - Cell 3
Average Synthetic Performance36,68742,41115.61%

Likewise, with creative workloads, both cards do very well, but the RTX 4070 Ti ends up doing about 22% better in terms of rendering and video transcoding overall.

It also gets noticeably better performance in Lumion 12.5's production quality 4K @ 60 fps movie render workload, producing 373 frames an hour of 4K rendered video, which is about 42% faster than the RTX 4070.

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Creative Workload Performance
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
V-Ray 5 CUDA1,8712,35125.65%
V-Ray 5 RTX2,6293,13119.09%
Lumion 12.5 1080p@60 fps, draft quality7,176 frames/hr7,796 frames/hr8.63%
Lumion 12.5 1080p@60 fps, production quality730 frames/hr962 frames/hr31.88%
Lumion 12.5 2160p@60 fps, production quality264 frames/hr373 frames/hr41.45%
Lumion 12.5 8K image render, production quality42 frames/hr52 frames/hr24.64%
Handbrake 4K to 1080p GPU encode170 frames/sec167 frames/sec-1.76%
Row 7 - Cell 3
Row 8 - Cell 0 Row 8 - Cell 1 Row 8 - Cell 2 Row 8 - Cell 3
Average Creative Performance1,5871,93922.18%

Finally, When it comes to gaming, the RTX 4070 Ti is simply in another league, even though the RTX 4070's performance across resolutions and settings is generally very good.

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No ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
1080p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus73 | 46 92 | 54 26.03% | 17.39%
F1 2022259 | 230 288 | 24011.2% | 4.35%
Total War: Warhammer III136 | 100166 | 13022.06% | 30.0%
Cyberpunk 207785 | 69111 | 9030.59% | 29.82%
Returnal131 | 76167 | 7927.48% | 3.95%
Tiny Tina's Wonderland156 | 124360 | 26662.5% | 59.57%
Counterstrike: Global Offensive72276462.75%
Row 9 - Cell 0 Row 9 - Cell 1 Row 9 - Cell 2 Row 9 - Cell 3
Average Native 1080p, Non-RT Performance143 | 111199 | 14538.72% | 31.14%
Swipe to scroll horizontally
No ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
1440p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus77 | 47 96 | 5724.68% | 21.28%
F1 2022204 | 170241 | 20520.59% | 28.24%
Total War: Warhammer III91 | 64113 | 8624.18% | 34.38%
Cyberpunk 207748 | 3766 | 5137.5% | 37.84%
Returnal101 | 65124 | 7022.77% | 7.69%
Tiny Tina's Wonderland107 | 91258 | 19459.81% | 50.55%
Counterstrike: Global Offensive47954529.27%
Row 9 - Cell 0 Row 9 - Cell 1 Row 9 - Cell 2 Row 9 - Cell 3
Average Native 1440p, Non-RT Performance105 | 80148 | 11040.35% | 37.61%
Swipe to scroll horizontally
No ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
2160p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus33 | 21 66 | 43100% | 104.76%
F1 2022136 | 116 156 | 13014.71% | 12.07%
Total War: Warhammer III47 | 3358 | 4323.40% | 30.30%
Cyberpunk 207719 | 1529 | 2152.63% | 40.0%
Returnal59 | 3974 | 4525.42% | 15.38%
Tiny Tina's Wonderland56 | 47137 | 10062.50% | 59.57%
Counterstrike: Global Offensive22428262.75%
Row 9 - Cell 0 Row 9 - Cell 1 Row 9 - Cell 2 Row 9 - Cell 3
Average Native 2160p, Non-RT Performance58 | 4545 | 3431.58% | 39.02%

Regardless of the benchmarks run, the RTX 4070 Ti generally overperforms the RTX 4070 in native res, non-ray-traced gaming by about 35% at 1080p, about 39% at 1440p, and about 43% at 4K.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Max ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
1080p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus73 | 46 108 | 5924.14% | 15.69%
F1 2022127 | 108 173 | 15936.22% | 47.22%
Cyberpunk 207757 | 4474 | 5629.82% | 27.27%
Returnal109 | 63136 | 8724.77% | 38.10%
Row 6 - Cell 0 Row 6 - Cell 1 Row 6 - Cell 2 Row 6 - Cell 3
Average Native 1080p, RT Performance93 | 65127 | 9637.51% | 46.51%
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Max ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
1440p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus59 | 38 76 | 4828.81% | 26.32%
F1 202285 | 73109 | 9328.24% | 27.40%
Cyberpunk 207735 | 2747 | 3534.29% | 29.63%
Returnal76 | 5499 | 4730.26% | -12.96%
Row 6 - Cell 0 Row 6 - Cell 1 Row 6 - Cell 2 Row 6 - Cell 3
Average Native 1440p, RT Performance64 | 4887 | 6135.84% | 26.67%
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Max ray tracing, native res, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
2160p, max settings, fpsAvg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
Metro: Exodus17 | 1346 | 32164.71% | 146.15%
F1 202248 | 4056 | 4816.67% | 20.0%
Cyberpunk 207715 | 819 | 1426.67% | 75.0%
Returnal52 | 3055 | 365.77% | 20.0%
Row 6 - Cell 0 Row 6 - Cell 1 Row 6 - Cell 2 Row 6 - Cell 3
Average Native 2160p RT Performance34 | 2545 | 3431.58% | 39.02%

Switch on ray tracing, and the performance on both cards takes a substantial hit unless you use DLSS. Without the upscaling tech though, the RTX 4070 averages about 34 fps with a 25 fps floor at 4K and a 64 fps average with a 48 fps floor at 1440p. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti's 45 fps average (34 fps floor) at 4K and an 87 fps average with 61 fps floor at 1440p, and you have a card that outperforms the RTX 4070 by about 36% overall at 1440p and 4K gameplay.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Max ray tracing, DLS, avg | min
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
Row 0 - Cell 0 Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
1080p167 | 98192 | 13014.96% | 32.35%
1440p125 | 87158 | 10226.4% | 17.05%
2160p108 | 7679 | 6036.67% | 27.83%
Row 5 - Cell 0 Row 5 - Cell 1 Row 5 - Cell 2 Row 5 - Cell 3
Average RT Performance w/ DLSS 2.0124 | 82152 | 10322.58% | 25.61%

So much of that performance loss for the RTX 4070 can be negated with DLSS, especially when set to ultra performance. It will still lag behind the RTX 4070 Ti by about 23-25% overall, but with just DLSS 2.0, the RTX 4070 is able to get just shy of 80 fps average at 4K with ray tracing maxed out. And crucially, it has an average floor of 60 fps at 4K with RT and DLSS turned on, which would easily give it a very smooth gaming experience overall.

Still, as impressive as the RTX 4070 is for the package it comes with, the RTX 4070 Ti is simply the better performer by a substantial margin when it comes to gaming.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
All gaming performance
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
Row 0 - Cell 0 Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)Avg | Min (1%)
1080p134 | 91173 | 12328.59% | 35.24%
1440p98 | 72131 | 9133.44% | 26.85%
2160p57 | 4379 | 5838.57% | 34.12%
Row 5 - Cell 0 Row 5 - Cell 1 Row 5 - Cell 2 Row 5 - Cell 3
Average Overal Gaming Performance96 | 69127 | 9132.19% | 32.08%

Finally, bringing all the scores together into our final score and you get a roughly 16% better performance across all workloads for the RTX 4070 Ti.

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Overall average scores
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
Synthetics36,68742,41115.61%
Creative1,5871,93913.96%
Gaming9612732.19%
Row 4 - Cell 0 Row 4 - Cell 1 Row 4 - Cell 2 Row 4 - Cell 3
Final Average Performance12,79014,82515.91%

There is just one last thing to note about the performance of these two cards, and that is the all-important value metric, i.e., how much performance are you getting for every dollar or pound spend.

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Overall average scores
Header Cell - Column 0 RTX 4070RTX 4070 TiPerformance Difference
Final Score12,7901482515.91%
MSRP$599$799 33.38%
Performance per MSRP $21.3518.55-15.1%

By this measure, the RTX 4070 Ti isn't as good of a value as the RTX 4070, seeing as the RTX 4070 Ti is about 34% more expensive but offers only 16% better performance overall. 

Still, if we are talking in absolute terms, which we kind of have to, then there's no denying that the RTX 4070 Ti will get you much better performance no matter what kind of workload you plan on throwing at it.

  • Winner: Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti

Which one should you buy?

An Nvidia RTX 4070 next to an Asus RTX 4070 Ti

(Image credit: Future)

This is genuinely one of the hardest questions to answer, since the RTX 4070 vs 4070 Ti are very close in terms of price and the performance differential isn't as wide as it is when looking at the RTX 4070 vs 4080, which has a much cleaner division between great performance all the way on one side and a significantly more affordable card on the other.

As it stands, you'll really have to make that decision on your own given what you know about your needs. Generally, if money isn't a concern, go for the RTX 4070 Ti. But if you have to pay bills like the rest of us, you can't just ignore the more affordable price of the RTX 4070. With that card, you're definitely going to get a much better value while still enjoying fantastic performance in all you endeavours.

I'd say that for most people out there, the RTX 4070 is definitely the card to go for. It's performance is excellent and its under $600 MSRP, which for most people is going to be their primary motivating factor in making a purchase like this.

John Loeffler
Components Editor

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. 

Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can find him online on Threads @johnloeffler.

Currently playing: Baldur's Gate 3 (just like everyone else).