Review – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition

At CES 2024, NVIDIA surprises many with the return of the SUPER variant cards after a long absence – introducing the RTX 40 SUPER series. The first to arrive at the market is the RTX 4070 SUPER, and it will be available at the starting price of $599. We have the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition for this review, which has been tested against the 4070 and 3090 to see if the 4070 SUPER justifies the upgrade.

Specifications

Overview

The Founders Edition of the RTX 4070 SUPER maintains a compact form factor similar to the RTX 4070 Founders Edition, which is ideal for small form factor builds. Sporting a sleek, stealthy design with a darker tone and no LED lighting, it caters to users who prefer a minimalist aesthetic.

As for the power, it uses the PCIe Gen5 header and NVIDIA recommends using an at least 650W power supply for this card. Of course, an adapter is with the card, so you can use your existing power supply.

Display output options on the 4070 SUPER FE are the usual 1xHDMI and 3xDP, but you might see different offerings from the other custom designs from the partners, as we have seen other partner brands offering 2xHDMI and 2xDP in the past.

System Specifications

The following is the list of hardware used to benchmark the RTX 4070 SUPER and we’re comparing it against 3 different cards – the RTX 3090, and RTX 4070 so we can have a better idea of the positioning of the card. Our games benchmark test focused on various AAA titles, running them at their maximum settings within the specified setup under an ambient temperature of 28°C.

Games Benchmark – Raster Performance

Starting with the raster performance, NVIDIA has marketed the 4070 SUPER for 1440p gaming but in reality, it is powerful enough to be able to run a handful of AAA titles at 4k resolution with over 60fps. It runs even faster than the RTX 3090. The exception will be Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 in our case, where the average frames observed is at around 40fps+- and better results can be seen on the RTX 3090.

Scaling down the resolution to 1440p, the RTX 4070 SUPER now runs mostly on par with the RTX 3090. For titles where the 4070 SUPER runs better, the gain we have observed is at about 13-18%.

Similar patterns can be seen on 1080p resolution as well but I don’t think anyone should spend $599 and only use it for 1080p gaming.

Games Benchmark – Ray Tracing Performance

Now for the ray tracing performance, we’ll be leaving out DLSS3 for this test as we wanted to see the base ray tracing performance of the RTX 4070 SUPER against the RTX 3090 without frame generation because clearly, the RTX 40 series cards will have the unfair advantage over any older cards. For the settings, we’re going with the usual configuration – highest graphics settings, ray tracing on ultra preset, and DLSS on quality preset.

At 4k resolution, the majority of the titles we’ve tested can achieve a very playable 60fps+ frame rate. The 4070 S struggles with titles that are much more demanding i.e. Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Metro Exodus.

For 1440P resolution, the RTX4070 SUPER easily overpowered both the RTX 3090 and RTX 4070 in almost every title we’ve tested. From the results, a minimum of 70fps on average on Alan Wake 2, and better performance of up to 20% over the 3090 for the rest.

That goes without saying with the 1080p with the RTX 4070 SUPER destroying its competition.

So, what about DLSS 3 then? It’s been more than a year since NVIDIA announced the feature and there’s more than a handful of titles out there that have DLSS 3 support now. However, NVIDIA didn’t stop just there and in fact, DLSS 3.5 was announced just before FSR 3 was made available. While frame generation is no longer an exclusive feature of the RTX 40 series cards with the introduction of FSR 3, the new ray reconstruction feature is something to look forward to if it’s done right.

As of now, I think it will still take a while before we can see more adoption of this feature, be it existing titles or newer upcoming titles.

Thermals & Power Draw

Moving on to the power draw and thermals, while we have observed a similar GPU load temperature on both the RTX 3090 and RTX 4070 SUPER, the power efficiency of the RTX 4070 SUPER is very impressive. From our test, the peak power draw of the RTX 3090 is recorded at about 350W meanwhile the RTX 4070 SUPER only draws about 220W on load. This is even more remarkable as the RTX 4070 SUPER delivers a better overall performance.

With that being said, a 650W power is enough for the RTX 4070 SUPER and we might be able to see models from the partners that come with a single 8-pin PCIe header.

Final Thoughts

Seeing the performance numbers, the RTX 4070 SUPER is without a doubt, another great ‘mid-high-range’ card from NVIDIA. It is technically a compact version of the RTX 3090 that only requires a 650W power supply to operate. This makes it a great option for those who want to build a really powerful yet compact system.

For the starting price of $599, it is a worthy upgrade if you’re coming from an RTX 20 series or older card. Though I’m more interested in the price adjustments for the RTX 4070, as the launch price for the card was at $599, now since the RTX 4070 SUPER is taking over the same price point, I expect the RTX 4070 will be getting a much more competitive price.