Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070: Highly efficient 1440p gaming

If you want superb 1440p gaming performance backed by excellent features, the RTX 4070 delivers. It's less well suited for 4K gaming

- BRAD CHACOS

Finally, Nvidia's 70-class GeForce graphics cards get more than 8GB of memory. And finally, there's a member of the RTX 40 series possibly worth buying other than the $1,600 flagship (fave.co/301pryl). Meet the 12GB GeForce RTX 4070. It hit the streets for $599 on April 13.

The GeForce RTX 4070 delivers exceptionally fast 1440p gaming performance while sipping power, a combination that let Nvidia create an adorably tiny Founders Edition version of the GPU. Those frame rates climb even higher in games that support Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology, and astronomically higher in games embracing DLSS 3 Frame Generation—even with ray tracing flipped on. Exceptional software features like Nvidia Broadcast, Reflex, and RTX Video Super Resolution help sweeten the pot.

The RTX 4070 may be worth considering, but it’s not a slam-dunk recommendation. Paying $599 for a 70-class graphics card explicitly marketed for 1440p gaming deeply aches, especially when Nvidia made technical decisions that actively hurt the GPU’s 4K gaming prowess. We’d also like to see 16GB of memory in a $600 graphics card in 2023. Still, while the RTX 4070 costs $100 more than its predecessor, it’s nowhere near as insultingly overpriced as the $800 RTX 4070 Ti (fave.co/40h209p) and $1,200 RTX 4080 (fave.co/40gi3UE).

With those broad-strokes impressions out of the way, let’s dig into the details.

SPECS 

Nvidia’s $599 GeForce RTX 4070 uses a cut-down version of the 4N “Ada Lovelace” AD104 GPU found in the RTX 4070 Ti. Here’s a look at its core specifications: 

Graphics Processing Clusters: 4

Texture Processing Clusters: 23