MSI RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard SOC Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
Whenever a new graphics card appears the manufacturer takes great pains to tell us what it’s replacing. Often the slides that accompany a launch will include a particular card. Usually it’s taken in a vacuum, ignoring pricing. It also often assumes that people skip a generation. So for the RTX 5070 Ti, Nvidia made sure we knew that as far as they were concerned it should be compared to the RTX 3070 Ti.
The launch price of the RTX 3070 Ti was £529, and the MSRP for the base cards is £729- the RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard – is at this moment unknown, but we are going to hope that it doesnt go any higher than £799. Inflation takes care of a lot of that. Inflation also means most of us have less money. But we’ll go along with it for now. If that is the comparison Nvidia were aiming for, obviously the RTX 5070 Ti totally smokes it. It’s not even close. Hell you’d be forgiven for thinking they aren’t even trying to be the same hardware. The RTX 3070 Ti has as much in common with the RTX 5070 Ti as a campfire cauldron does to a microwave.
Generally the rule of thumb, and like all rules it’s very broad, is that each new generation is one better than before. The RTX 4080 matched the performance of the RTX 3090. The aforementioned RTX 3070 Ti was about as good as the RTX 2080 Ti. So for all of Nvidia’s desires that we focus upon how the RTX 5070 Ti fares against the RTX 3070 Ti, as you can see from our graphs it follows the rule of thumb. It’s RTX 4080 (sometimes super) performance, but with the added ability of doing multi-frame-generation.
It’s worth saying again, in case you haven’t yet experienced Nvidia’s Frame Gen technology, that it gives you more FPS for, as far as we can tell, free. The AMD AFMF tech gives more frames, but at the cost of a lot of image quality. Intel’s XeSS is better, but still has image degradation. Frame Gen doesn’t make your game look any worse than if it’s pure raster. It’s witchcraft. Even at x4 you’d need two screenshots and a magnifying glass to begin to spot any lessening of detail, and nobody – except Digital Foundry – can be bothered. We’ll happily take a blind comparison test. “I can’t believe it’s not raster”.
Clearly the GPU itself is the latest in a long line of successful Nvidia Ti products. In MSI guise you’re getting the great Vanguard cooler too. On the RTX 5080 SOC it kept it more than cool enough, and here in RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard guise it’s also a good performer. With decent performance the MSI RTX 5070 Ti SOC Vanguard would win an award. Usually…….
Ghost Chili on a Toast Point
Oh dear. MSRP of the RTX 5070 Ti is £729. The excellent Palit GameRock OC is £769. ***EDIT – on launch day we couldnt find the Palit below £869, the rest of our thoughts on the MSI pricing still stand*** Fair enough. It’s faster and cool. This Vanguard isn’t quite as fast as the Palit. If you’d asked us before we found out, we’d have thought £799. MSI are always a little more expensive, like ASUS, but this isn’t a flagship Suprim or similar. It’s a decent performing, well cooled, mid-range card. Apparently the MSRP is £969. Nine hundred and sixty-nine pounds. Two hundred pounds more than the Palit, and £240 more than a base card, for a regular Vangaurd card with a plastic toy.
We love the plastic toy. Don’t get us wrong. We like the Dragon and we’re glad we’ve finally got one. It’s hardly £240s worth of goods though. The Vanguard hasn’t got a gold plated cooler. The carbon fibre isn’t real. It isn’t cherry-picked to the point it’s 300MHz faster than the Palit.
Its not actually a limited edition card AT ALL . To quote Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, “Kiss me…”.
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