RTX 4070 ti - Suddenly good?

Suddenly (no) Nvidia's presentation with their innovative RTX 4090 failed. Spherical horse in a vacuum turned out to be unaffordable for many, because "cryptocurrency cashback" is a thing of the past. But misfortune does not come alone...

Six months later, competitors in the form of AMD roll out something that attempts to claim the right of primacy, openly dumping, and in the end wins with a small margin. As if losing to AMD wasn't enough, Nvidia has another problem. From the few buyers of RTX 4090 comes more and more complaints about the defective connector. And though the percentage of burned out connectors did not exceed 0.5%, the defects managed to damage the reputation. That is how the announcement of the most powerful video card in a moment turned into a total failure. Doesn't this story have a happy ending?

Battle of the Titans

Toward the end of 2022, AMD and Nvidia began to squabble. The second contender in this battle is not to be envied. It would seem that Nvidia invested their money in a void, but the rescue came from where it was not expected. Remember when Nvidia's CEO, Jason Huang, was totally serious and enthusiastic about introducing the 16 GB GeForce RTX 4080 and... the 12 GB GeForce RTX 4080? A lot of people laughed and twiddled their thumbs at the time, but thoughtful people even then noted that the lowest power video card is a future RTX 4070 ti under a different name. The prophecy has come true by half. Yes, in characteristics RTX 4070 ti does resemble GeForce RTX 4080 on 12 GB...

...But with RTX 4070 ti the situation is funny. Now Nvidia is dumping AMD, but inside out, but about that later...

I labeled RTX 4090 as "Spherical horse in a vacuum" for a reason. This video card came out without taking into account the harsh realities: a huge video card with huge power consumption for huge money. Recall: the recommended price of the GeForce RTX 4090 is $1199. And now imagine how much such a card will cost at resellers. Nvidia has learned their mistake on time, that is why the recommended price of RTX 4070 ti is $799, $100 less than the price of a junior graphics card of the new flagship AMD - AMD RX 7900 XT. But the question of performance remains open...

Performance

RTX 4070 ti is equipped with a modest 12 GB version of GDDR6X SDRAM on chips manufactured by Micron. Nominal memory frequency is 21000 MHz, GPU frequency is 2625 (Boost).

This time Nvidia decided to make a move: discarding dry numbers, you can actually notice that RTX 4070 ti is noticeably cooler than the closest competitors. Where RTX 3090 heated up to 92 degrees Celsius, RTX 4070 ti does not get warmer than 80. With RTX 3090 RTX 4070 ti is also related to performance:

The RTX 4070 ti is comparable in power to the RTX 3090, but faster and, most interestingly, more energy efficient. The RTX 4070 ti consumes up to 291W, and 320W at its peak. The power saving is especially noticeable in heavy games. For example, in everyone's favorite Cyberpunk 2077:

But if you want a more visual comparison with the 4000 series RTX, here it is:

A Plague Tale: Requiem was taken as an example, as it is one of the most demanding games of 2022. The tests revealed that GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is about 5-10% faster than GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

What's the catch?

In the very same dumping inside out by Nvidia. The energy crisis is not going anywhere, electricity is becoming more expensive every day. Previously, consumers were only scared off by video card price tags, but now these same consumers are thrown into a cold sweat by electricity bills.

Similar cards with GeForce RTX 4070 Ti consume about one and a half times more electricity. In addition, there is no notorious DLSS 3.0 on everyone's favorite GeForce RTX 3090, which is slowly becoming a crutch for poor optimization.

Sadly, DLSS 3.0 is becoming a necessity for modern gaming. Raw processing power was a stumbling block for Nvidia in 2022 - without RTX, FRS, DLSS and other technologies enabled, graphics cards from AMD ripped the GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 to shreds. But as soon as it came to streaming power costs, Nvidia regained the lost ground.

Throw in the fact that for the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, the buyer no longer needs to change their power supply from 800W to 1000W and you get a pretty good win-win deal.