Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti review: a next-gen GPU that's worth the asking price?

Rasterisation analysis - part one.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 4 Jan 2023

So far, we've seen that the RTX 4070 Ti performs well with ray-traced titles, essentially delivering frame-rates that sit at a mid-point between RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti - with just the occasional outlier that paints the cheaper RTX 3080 in a decent light. In most cases, we've also seen the RTX 4070 Ti defeat its closest AMD RDNA 3 challenger: RX 7900 XT. That may well change now as we shift into rasterisation testing, where AMD delivered strong results with its latest offerings.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Control

To benchmark Control outside of RT, we move back to the game's opening moments - an easily repeatable scene that'll have to do bearing in mind the lack of a bespoke benchmark, or indeed easily accessible cutscenes. This title struggled in RT and the situation doesn't improve much without RT and in a different area of the game, no less. The performance differential against RTX 3080 wasn't great in the corridor of doom and it only improves a touch outside of it here as we log a mere 11 percent boost to performance. Control isn't any kinder to AMD hardware either and here, the RX 7900 XT only pushes ahead by around eight percentage points.

Looking at the new card in relation to the other RTX 4000 cards, it's interesting to note that the 4090 is 28 percent faster than the 4080, which is in turn 29 percent ahead of the 4070 Ti. We've been looking at the RTX 3090 Ti as the natural last-gen comparison point, but here it has a big 15 percentage point advantage. The RTX 4070 Ti is actually more in line with 3080 Ti performance in this one.

CONTROL, HIGH, DX12, TAA

Cyberpunk 2077

We continue our Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarking with our developer streaming test, which sees the game automatically run itself around a circuit of Night City before returning control to the player - here we're on ultra settings with reconstruction and RT disabled. 4K is still highly challenging here, and it's a scenario similar to Control where the 4070 Ti falls short of expectations. It's another slightly disappointing ten percent uplift in performance against RTX 3080, while AMD's RX 7900 XT delivers a commanding 25 percentage point lead.

Looking at the Nvidia Ada Lovelace stack, the 4080 is almost 30 percent faster, though the 4090 is off-pace with a 'mere' 60 percentage point lead. We've continued to use the 3090 Ti here as our main comparison point for last-gen Nvidia, but the fact is it's circa 18-19 percent better - and in actual fact, the 4070 Ti fails to match RTX 3080 Ti, let alone RTX 3090.

CYBERPUNK 2077, ULTRA, DX12, TAA

F1 22

Stripping out the RT features from F1 22, but retaining everything else at ultra sees the rasterisation situation for the RTX 4070 Ti shift back towards the more underwhelming results we've seen on this page, with a mere 11 percentage point uplift for the new card up against the RTX 3080. This, in turn, allows AMD's closest competitor - the RX 7900 XT - to deliver a 21 percentage point advantage. Even the older RX 6900 XT is still in the fight here, offering up around 93 percent of the RTX 4070 Ti's performance.

F1 22 without RT is another game that sees the RTX 4090 most likely hitting CPU limitations, as it only seems to deliver around 17 percent more performance than the RTX 4080. Even so, the overly expensive 80-class product still offers a 28 percentage point lead over 4070 Ti, so we're clearly back in GPU-bound territory in this power class. Once again, the 4070 Ti can't match the RTX 3090 Ti, which is around 12 points to the better - it sits at a mid-point between RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090.