“4090 performance at $549.”
That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had previously existed, for around one-third the price.
Let’s dispel that notion up front. No, the GeForce RTX 5070 is not as fast as an RTX 4090, not without some very creative comparing of non-comparable numbers. Per usual for the 50-series, Nvidia is leaning on its AI-generated interpolated frames for the bulk of its claimed performance improvements. In terms of actual rendering speed, the 5070 isn’t even as fast as a 4080 or a 4070 Ti. It’s barely faster than last year’s 4070 Super, and with disproportionately higher power usage.
Andrew Cunningham
The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is a lot smaller than the 5090/5080 design.
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Like the 5090/5080, the 5070 switches to a slightly angled 12-pin power connector.
Andrew Cunningham
The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is a lot smaller than the 5090/5080 design.
Andrew Cunningham
Like the 5090/5080, the 5070 switches to a slightly angled 12-pin power connector.
Andrew Cunningham
For all that, it’s still not necessarily a bad card—it’s a little faster than the $599 4070 Super at the same $549 price that Nvidia used for the RTX 4070. It still represents Nvidia’s minimum viable 4K GPU, once you factor in DLSS upscaling, and it’s well suited for people with 1440p monitors.
But it’s a hard card to get excited about, and unlike every other 50-series GPU released so far, it actually has to compete against something—AMD’s new Radeon RX 9070 series. I can’t talk in detail about how these cards all stack up until later this week, but suffice it to say that Nvidia could use something a bit more impressive than the RTX 5070 at this price.
GeForce RTX 5070 specs
| RTX 5070 Ti | RTX 4070 Ti Super | RTX 5070 | RTX 4070 Super | RTX 4070 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CUDA Cores | 8,960 | 8,448 | 6,144 | 7,168 | 5,888 |
| Boost Clock | 2,452 MHz | 2,610 MHz | 2,512 MHz | 2,475 MHz | 2,475 MHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 896 GB/s | 672 GB/s | 672 GB/s | 504 GB/s | 504 GB/s |
| Memory size | 16GB GDDR7 | 16GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR7 | 12GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X |
| TGP | 300 W | 285 W | 250 W | 220 W | 200 W |
The 5070’s CUDA core count falls right in between the RTX 4070 and the 4070 Super’s, where the 5080 and 5070 Ti both included small increases from their previous generation counterparts. To boost speeds over the 4070 Super, this means Nvidia is leaning on architectural improvements in Blackwell, the memory bandwidth increase from GDDR7 (a fairly significant 33 percent increase), and increased GPU clock speeds (the memory switch and clock speed boosts likely explain the higher power consumption).
