The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, part of the new Super-branded mid-generation graphics card refresh announced at CES 2024, is already here. At the same $599 price point as the original GeForce RTX 4070, this graphics card makes an already great graphics card even better, with more cores with only slightly higher power consumption. It's not enough to make upgrading from the RTX 4070 to the RTX 4070 Super remotely worth it, but if you have an older graphics card, now could be the best time to make the upgrade.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Graphics Cards at Amazon
Performance is significantly improved over the original RTX 4070, along with more VRAM that should make the graphics card a little bit more future-proof.
Another Swing at Redefining the Mid-Range
The biggest pitfall of graphics cards in general over the last three or four years has been rising costs, especially in the mid-range. The Nvidia RTX 4070 Super keeps things locked at $599, but it's hard to look back at 2020's $499 RTX 3070 and not be a little salty about it. But while the RTX 4070 was arguably not a big enough upgrade over the 3070 for the increased cost, the RTX 4070 Super absolutely is and stands as the solid mid-range graphics card the RTX 4070 should have been in the first place. Luckily the Super is completely replacing the original GPU.
At the same $599 cost as the original RTX 4070, the RTX 4070 Super packs in 10 more Streaming Multiprocessors, resulting in a total of 7,168 CUDA cores, up from 5,888. While that's coupled with the exact same boost clock of 2,475 MHz, it ends up delivering substantially better performance, especially at higher resolutions.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is absolutely what the RTX 4070 should have been when it launched last year. This is what a mid-range card in 2024 should look like, even if it's a little more expensive than I would like it to be. No matter how many times I hear a $600 PC component called "mid-range", I can't stop the gut feeling that it's a bit too expensive. I might just be getting old, though.
The AI Future is Nvidia's Past
Because Nvidia launched its RTX 4000 Super cards at CES 2024, we're going to have to talk about AI a little bit, because Team Green has been leading the pack for a while. The star of the show for PC gamers is of course going to be DLSS 3.0, which the RTX 4070 Super naturally supports. DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is Nvidia's upscaling tech that uses generative AI to upscale games from a lower resolution to a higher resolution.
DLSS 3.0 builds on that foundation by taking in a bunch of motion data for the game to be able to generate entirely new frames without having to wait for your CPU to catch up. This is a huge change from how games are typically rendered, where the CPU feeds your GPU data between each frame to keep each other busy. This not only helps improve framerates, but can especially help in open-world games like Cyberpunk 2077, where there can be times where your GPU is bottlenecked by your CPU. This feature is a huge selling point for this graphics card, and while it's not supported in every game, it's supported in enough recent launches that it's seriously worth considering going Team Green if the games you like to play do support DLSS 3.0.
You just have to look at the numbers to see why it's a huge deal in supported games. In Cyberpunk 2077, moving from standard DLSS 2.0 to DLSS 3.0 with Frame Generation boosts the framerate from 91 fps to 128 fps, a massive 29% boost at the flick of a switch.
There is a downside, though. In games where you're not already getting more than 30 fps, turning on DLSS 3.0 with Frame Generation can introduce distracting visual artifacts. The sweet spot to get the most out of Frame Generation is between 45-75 fps.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super – Specs and Design
Just like the RTX 4070 that preceded it, the RTX 4070 Super is based on Nvidia's Ada Lovelace graphics microarchitecture, it just has, well, more of it. The graphics card is built on 56 Streaming Multiprocessors, which combine to include 7,168 Cuda Cores, 56 RT (ray tracing) cores, and 224 Tensor Cores. This is around a 21% boost in raw silicon, and that's coupled with an increased TGP (total graphics power) from 200W to 220W.
The RTX 4070 Super also sees a boost in VRAM, both in capactity and bandwidth. The GPU features 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM clocked in at 10,500MHz on a 192-bit bus. All of this makes the RTX 4070 Super a complete upgrade to the RTX 4070, which it is completely replacing. If you've been waiting on purchasing an xx70 card, this is the time to jump on it, as we probably won't see the next-generation RTX 5070 for another year at the absolute least.
Visually, the Founder's Edition looks a little bit different too. The silhouette remains unchanged, but the RTX 4070 Super logo is now black, instead of the gray logo that the original RTX 4070 sported. It's a minor change, but it looks way nicer, especially if you're the type to have your graphics card vertically mounted.
As far as ports, it's completely unchanged. You still have the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector, which will be annoying to anyone that still loves their 8-pin PCI cables, but luckily Nvidia is still including an adapter in the box that converts two 8-pin power connectors to one 16-pin connector.
The Nvidia RTX 4070 Super sports three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and one HDMI 2.1 connector, which should let the graphics card connect to pretty much any monitor on the market. Though, I do wish Nvidia would graduate to the DisplayPort 2.1 connector, like AMD, so I could power higher-end monitors like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G95 at its native resolution and refresh rate. But that's a question for the next generation, I guess.
Finally, the cooling solution is largely the same as the rest of the RTX 4000 graphics card lineup. Rather than having two fans on one side of the graphics card, there is one on the front and one on the back, this configuration pulls cool air through the bottom of the graphics card and shoots out hot air through the top of your PC case. This isn't the best news for your RAM or CPU, but throughout all of my testing with graphics cards in this cooling configuration, I really haven't noticed any difference in CPU temperatures.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super – Performance
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, at its core, is at its best playing games at 1440p and high refresh rates. Across my testing suite, the graphics card had no trouble at all toppling its predecessor in every single game, usually with about a 10% difference. It doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of the RTX 4070 Ti – which was essentially a RTX 4080 with less VRAM – but this is an extremely powerful graphics card.
At 1440p, you can expect between 90-100 fps in pretty much any game you throw at it. In Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and DLSS on the Balanced setting, the RTX 4070 Super got an incredible 91 fps, compared to the RTX 4070's 81 and RTX 4070 Ti's 100. Turn on DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation and that number jumps up even more, up to 128 fps, enough to actually label it high refresh rate gaming.
Even in games that don't support DLSS, the RTX 4070 Super impresses, with the GPU managing 108 fps at 1440p in Total War Warhammer 3, which is 14% faster than the RTX 4070 in the same test. That's fast enough to give the RTX 4070 Ti's 116 fps a run for its money.
In fact, the RTX 4070 Super is fast enough to justify breaking into 4K gaming, even in high-end games. In Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 2.0, I managed a solid 59 fps average. And when I turned on Frame Generation, that jumped to 81 fps, making it immensely playable at that high resolution.
In synthetic benchmarks, the RTX 4070 Super continues to be the best graphics card in its weight class. In 3DMark Speed Way, the RTX 4070 Super is 15% faster than the original RTX 4070, and a whopping 42% faster than the Radeon RX 7700 XT – although AMD's card is a fair bit more affordable at $449. Even in Blender, the RTX 4070 Super sees a significant improvement, managining 3,645 samples a second in the Monster benchmark, compared to 3,131 with the RTX 4070. That's also a 16% improvement.
Across the board, this is the performance we should have had when the RTX 4070 first dropped back in April 2023. This is the high-end 1440p and borderline 4K graphics card we were asking for. It's a shame it took this long to get here, but at least your $600 will go a bit further now.
