Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition Review

Conclusion

Whenever you look at a new graphics card purchase the main factor to consider is nearly always price. Nothing in your rig will give you such an obvious and immediate return than spending a little extra on your GPU. Faster drives eventually get slowed down by the OS. Faster processors only really show up in specific, heavy-loading scenarios. But graphical horsepower, that’s instant, immediate and clearly noticeable in every gaming scenario.

The pricing of graphics cards in recent years has been higher than Everest thanks to supply issues and the global financial crisis. Additionally some of the newer cards have so much new technology inside them that there is a level of early adopter cost built in too. The newest addition to the Nvidia 4000 series, the RTX 4070, is priced much more competitively than a lot of their recent launches, partly because the world has somewhat got back to normal, but also partly because Nvidia have designed it more for those of you who game at 1440P rather than 4K.

That doesn’t seem as crazy as it might. 4K gaming, whilst it’s the buzzword for people trying to sell you new hardware, is still a rarity for the majority of people and 1440P is actually the sweet spot, where you get much higher visual fidelity than 1080P, without requiring a trip to Fort Knox to obtain the funding necessary to do it justice. Many people have a 4K panel and tolerate 40 FPS because that’s somehow ‘better’ than running a less-kudos inspiring 1440P but getting 70 FPS average.

For the sake of equality and an apples-to-apples comparison we tested the RTX 4070 FE on both 1440 and 4K, and our graphs are sorted by average FPS in the 4K resolution. That’s something to bear in mind if you’re the type of person to merely glance at our graphs. Even so we think the RTX 4070 is much closer to the RTX 4070 Ti than we expected it to be, especially given the price difference. Although it’s not the be-all and end-all of gaming tests, we think the fact that this card, specifically not aimed at 4K gamers, still got over 60 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 with RT and DLSS turned on speaks volumes about how good the underlying performance of the card is.

If you’ve been itching to get on the DLSS 3 bandwagon with a 4000 series card then the Nvidia RTX 4070 FE is the perfect sweet-spot between price and performance. Very close to the RTX 4070 Ti but with a much more attractive MSRP of £589 and thus wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

Discuss the Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition in our OC3D Forums.