NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Review

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 has landed. This is the fourth graphics card hitting the shelves as part of the RTX 5000 launch and is the last of the upper-tier cards thus far. The NVIDIA RTX 5000 range hasn’t been received with overwhelming positivity thus far, with the RTX 5090 being the only card that hasn’t been criticised immediately after launch. This means that the RTX 5070 has its work cut out, especially with AMD’s RX 9070 and 9070 XT, both of which are competing cards.

NVIDIA’s 70-tier class of GPUs are generally quite popular. The RTX 4070 and 4070 SUPER offer a great value proposition as they strike a delicate balance between pricing and performance. With an MSRP of $549, the RTX 5070 is aimed at those building a mid-range gaming PC, which was competing with cards like the RX 7900 GRE at the time. Performance-wise, the RTX 4070 range is geared more towards 1440p but has decent legs in 4K, so there’s no reason to expect that the RTX 5070 will be any different from the previous generation offering.

However, we’ll save the speculation until we get to the benchmarks. The RTX 5070 has launched at $549 with the Founders Edition and select AIB cards available at this all-important price. But one critical question remains: Is this card worth picking up compared to its predecessors? While NVIDIA’s AI-backed DLSS and Frame Generation technology is likely to turn heads, if we’re met with poor stocking, pricing, and performance, the RTX 5070 may be in the same position as the RTX 5070 Ti, which would be pretty damning for 50-series cards.

However, we’ll reserve judgment until we get a complete overview of this GPU. We’ve reviewed the RTX 5070 today, exploring its tech specs, architecture, design, and performance benchmarks to determine whether it is a worthwhile pickup.

Specification

As we’ve alluded to in the introduction, the RTX 5070 has hit the shelves with a much anticipated MSRP of $549, which is $50 less than the RTX 4070 and 4070 SUPER. The MSRP of this card is fairly critical for one main reason: the competition. AMD have already announced their RDNA4 lineup, and the RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards are priced similarly to the RTX 5070. So, NVIDIA being somewhat more competitive than the previous generation puts the RTX 5070 in a better position if AMD’s flagship cards blow it out of the water.

If I’m being nitpicky, seeing a $500 RTX 5070 would have been nice. I don’t think $549 is entirely unreasonable (depending on the performance), but a $500 mid-range 4K-capable graphics card could have been a significant selling point for NVIDIA. Either way, it’s slightly disappointing that this card is only $50 cheaper than the previous generation’s options.

Regarding specs, the RTX 5070 has 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM on a 192-bit memory bus. This is the same as the RTX 4070 SUPER, except that the 5070 uses GDDR7 memory, a new feature of all the 5000-series GPUs. I’m in two minds about the VRAM capacity. On the one hand, it would be great if this card had 16GB of VRAM, especially because high-resolution gaming can easily use more than 12GB. In Cyberpunk 2077, as an example, playing this title at 4K uses about 11.2GB of VRAM, which is just on the cusp. This means you won’t really be able to run other applications while playing this game at 4K due to the VRAM limitations.

On the other hand, 12GB of VRAM will be fine for most games. There are a few exceptions where AAA titles demand more than 12GB, but these are pretty rare circumstances, even at 1440p and 4K.

Two other significant changes to the specs are worth mentioning. The first is power consumption. The RTX 5070 consumes 250W of power instead of 220W, so you may need to upgrade if you’re sitting on the edge of your PSU’s max wattage. However, this isn’t likely to affect many prospective buyers.

Additionally, the other significant change is the AI TOPS performance. We’ve covered this numerous times in our other 50-series content, but essentially, it powers DLSS and the latest version of Frame Generation—Multi Frame Gen. NVIDIA claims that without AI, this wouldn’t be possible. While this may be true, Team Green has received plenty of criticism for their latest AI-powered innovation, with many referring to Multi Frame Gen as “fake frames”. To further compound this, Multi Frame Gen is only available for RTX 5000 graphics cards, so RTX 4000 users won’t be able to leverage this tech at all.

Design

As always, the Founders Edition variant is a card that offers a no-frills approach to GPU design. NVIDIA has adhered to the same look for all of their other RTX 5000 FE models, which are sleek, primarily black shrouds with plenty of heatsink on display and two fans. Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5070 version is a reasonably small card, at 242mm long. NVIDIA has said that gone are the days of 3-slot cards, and it’s very clear that with the RTX 5000 range we’ve seen so far that they’re sticking to this.

The front of the card houses two black fans, which take in air and exhaust it out of the back through a large fin stack. This area of the card is mostly black, with a contrasting silver shining through the diagonals of the GPU. The rest of the chassis showcases this silver design, with the “GEFORCE RTX” text lighting up once the card is fully powered.

The RTX 5000 range uses an angled 16-pin power connector instead of a straight 90-degree one. This alleviates pressure on the card’s header, making it easier to angle around a bend.

Otherwise, I’d say the RTX 5070 Founders Edition, much like its siblings, is a fairly basic graphics card. I like the FE design, but it won’t be for everyone. The lack of RGB will be off-putting for some, and the fairly simplistic black and silver aesthetic won’t appeal to all builders. However, I’d argue that the RTX 5070 FE isn’t a card that prioritises design. This is a GPU you pick up because it’s a card that sits at MSRP, making the minimalist approach to the design more excusable.

Architecture

As we’ve covered in our reviews of the RTX 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090, alongside the Blackwell architecture, which powers all these cards, NVIDIA has also introduced a whole new iteration of DLSS, DLSS 4.0. With this comes improvements to the baseline upscaling of DLSS, further alleviating performance overhead in supported games while continuing to decrease latency and improve visual fidelity. The AI TOPS performance is what makes this performance uplift possible.

In addition to this, DLSS 4.0 brings a new technology that NVIDIA refers to as Multi Frame Generation. As we’ve alluded to above, Multi Frame Gen hasn’t been received with open arms, but it does offer some performance bonuses that aren’t without merit. Multi Frame Generation works by creating additional frames for every rasterised frame rendered by the game. For every in-game frame, you get three AI-generated frames. The result is that the game looks and feels much smoother, eliminating choppiness.

This is all AI-powered, so theoretically, it shouldn’t add overhead or cause slowdowns. However, there is one specific caveat, and this is latency. The latency problem is a bit of a mixed bag. Certain games are worse than others. Cyberpunk 2077 had the worst latency at 16ms, whereas Hogwarts Legacy hovered around 2ms. Both of these are single-player AAA titles, so the latency for many may be worth the additional frames and smoothness, but in multiplayer games where reactivity is key, it’ll be worth keeping Multi Frame Generation switched off.

It’s worth highlighting that Multi Frame Generation is only supported in a handful of games thus far, and due to the latency, we don’t recommend having it on all the time. However, with improvements to overall performance, Multi Frame Gen is a technology that we imagine will become incredibly popular with lower-end cards, allowing you to enjoy higher resolutions at solid framerates.

Performance

As always, all of our benchmarking and testing is done by our in-house benchmarker, Harry Coleman, who has worked tirelessly to gather all the data needed for our RTX 5000 series content. The RTX 5070 and a range of competitor graphics cards have been tested in our primary benchmarking system paired with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to provide the best framerates possible across all of the titles we tested. The games featured in this benchmarking section provide a mix of AAA games and modern Esports titles to see how the RTX 5070 holds up in various games.

Cyberpunk 2077

Settings: 4K, Shadow Quality High, Indirect Lighting High, Reflections High, Crowd Density High, Particle Quality High, Volumetric Lighting High, Motion Blur off, GTAO Quality High, Grass Quality High, Contact Shadows High VSync Off, DLSS: On/Off, Ray Tracing: On/Off, Textures: High

In our first benchmarking run, we fired up Cyberpunk 2077 and played this title at 1440p and 4K. In our 4K run, the RTX 5070 sits at a reasonably low 60FPS, putting it 10FPS above the RTX 4070 SUPER in pure rasterised gameplay. While the performance increase is welcomed, 10FPS isn’t a massive improvement overall.

With DLSS, Frame Gen and ray tracing thrown into the mix, the RTX 5070 <>FPS, again, a reasonably small gain over the RTX 4070 SUPER. Even with Frame Gen, the RTX 5070 is struggling to offer much of an improvement above the RTX 4070 SUPER, which sits at 67FPS. While this GPU isn’t necessarily targeted as a 4K GPU, it’s disappointing that there are no major gains here.

Alan Wake 2

Settings: 4K, Post-Processing High, Texture Resolution High, Texture Filtering High, Volumetric Lighting High, Global Illumination Quality High, Shadow Detail High, Terrain Quality High, Ray-Tracing: Enabled, Ray Tracing Preset High, DLSS: On/Off, Frame Generation: On/Off

Unfortunately, things aren’t much better in Alan Wake 2 at 4K. This is an intense game, so we’ll take the numbers here with a pinch of salt, but the RTX 5070 offered an average framerate of 33FPS. This is pure rasterised gameplay, which the vast majority of the cards we’ve tested seem to struggle with. This output from the RTX 5070 was a marginal improvement over the RTX 4070 SUPER, in which Alan Wake 2 was pretty unplayable. I’d argue that anything below 60FPS and you’re teetering into choppy territory.

After switching on ray tracing, DLSS, and Frame Gen, performance improved, but not by much. The RTX 5070 in this benchmark gained about 20FPS compared to the rasterised run, with an average of 54FPS.

Hogwarts Legacy

Settings: 1440p, Effects High, Material High, Fog High, Sky High, Foliage High, Post Process High, Shadows High, Textures High, View Distance High, Population High, Anti Aliasing TAA High, Windowed Fullscreen

After firing up Hogwarts Legacy, we decided to dial the resolution to 1440p, which is a much more comfortable setting for the RTX 5070. In this AAA title, the RTX 5070 offered an output of 130FPS, a 9FPS gain over the RTX 4070 SUPER, and a 5FPS improvement above AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The performance leaps aren’t exceptional here, but we were expecting more out of the RTX 5070 compared to the previous generation. The framerate here is definitely playable, but the gain in rasterised gameplay is pretty small.

With DLSS and Frame Gen switched on, framerates surged up to 235FPS, with the RTX 5070 sitting 15FPS above the RTX 4070 SUPER at 220FPS. Again, the gain here is fairly minuscule; 15FPS isn’t a massive jump, which is beginning to demonstrate that the RTX 5070 isn’t offering a hefty uplift compared to its predecessor.

Marvel Rivals

Settings: 1440p, Graphics Quality High, Global Illumination Lumen GI- High Quality, Reflection Quality Screen Space Reflections, Model Detail High, Post-Processing High, Shadow Detail High, DLSS On/Off, Frame Gen On/Off

In Marvel Rivals at 1440p, the RTX 5070 sits towards the bottom of the graph outputting 110FPS on average, this time around, losing out to the RTX 4070 SUPER by 10FPS. Weirdly, the RTX 5070 seems to be weaker in this title compared to the RTX 4070 SUPER. While I don’t feel this performance loss is a deal-breaker, it is somewhat strange.

When DLSS and Frame Gen were switched on, the RTX 5070 jumped to a 228FPS average, with the RTX 4070 SUPER leading again with 231FPS. The gap is a bit narrower here, but it’s interesting to see that despite the improvements to DLSS, the RTX 5070 can’t catch up to its predecessor.

COD Black Ops 6

Settings: 1440p, Graphics Preset Custom, Texture Resolution High, Depth of Field On, Detail Quality High, Particle Resolution High, Shader Quality High, Shadow Quality High, Screen Space Shadows High, DLSS On/Off, Frame Gen On/Off

We fired up the Zombies mode in COD Black Ops 6 at 1440p high. This benchmark saw an average of 119FPS from the RTX 5070, with the RTX 4070 SUPER sitting at 132FPS, a 13FPS lead. We did a DLSS run, which also utilised Frame Generation. However, we saw no reason to include it in this benchmarking run, as the performance difference was fairly disappointing and didn’t impact the rasterised results.

Apex Legends

Settings: 1440p, Anti-aliasing TSAA, Texture Filtering 8X, Model Detail High, VSync Disabled, Effects High, Ambient Occlusion Quality High

In our second-to-last game, we ran Apex Legends at 1440p high settings. It’s no surprise to see the RTX 5070 offer similar performance to the RTX 4070 SUPER. The 5070 held firmly at 291FPS, while the RTX 4070 sat just above at 293FPS. Ultimately, at framerates this high, the performance difference doesn’t really matter, but it’s interesting to see how each GPU holds up in this 1440p benchmark.

Fortnite

Settings: 1080p, Competitive, View Distance Far, FPS Unlimited, VSync Off, Anti-Aliasing TAA, Shadows Off, Reflections Off, Textures Low

The last title we ran was Fortnite, benchmarking at 1080p competitive settings, which is everything dialled to low. Oddly, the RTX 5070 in this run offered a pretty strong showing compared to our other runs, hitting a rather monstrous 451FPS. The RTX 4070 SUPER sits towards the bottom of the graph with an output of 405FPS. This benchmark isn’t designed to showcase how strong a GPU is, but more to offer a visual for the performance difference between generations. This is the only gaming run where we saw a significant uplift versus the RTX 4070 SUPER, which is disappointing, considering this is 1080p.

Conclusion