Nvidia has finally unveiled its GeForce RTX 4070 GPU after ongoing rumors about the mid-range card’s existence.
Team Green’s latest graphics card launches tomorrow, and will retail for $599/ £589. That’s a pretty decent saving over the existing RTX 4070 Ti, which still regularly sells for $799. Calling $599 a ‘budget’ option may be stretching things, but the RTX 4070 will do a lot less damage to your bank balance than the $1,199 RTX 4080.
In terms of specs, the RTX 4070 FE (Founder's Edition, i.e. the version sold by Nvidia itself) has 5,888 CUDA cores, a 192 bit memory bus, a base clock of 1920MHz and 12GB of GDDR6X RAM. That last stat is worth noting, as that’s the same amount of VRAM as the RTX 4070 Ti.
With memory issues seemingly becoming a bigger deal with every passing month — just look at the disastrous launch of The Last of Us Part 1 — 12GB should let you run most modern PC games with top-tier texture settings enabled.
RTX Founders Edition specs
Dimensions-wise, the RTX 4070 FE is 9.5 inches long and 1.5 inches thick, meaning it should comfortably fit into most mid-tower (or larger) PC cases.
As for connections, the RTX 4070 has a single HDMI 2.1 port that will let you run games at 4K/120fps on the best TVs in 2023, and a trio of DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. As a dual-slot GPU, the RTX 4070 also requires a 16-pin power connector, which means you may need a separate power adapter to make the card work with your PSU.
Like its more expensive RTX 40-series siblings, Nvidia’s latest Founder’s Edition GPU uses the company’s Ada Lovelace architecture. That means it supports ray-tracing, alongside Nvidia’s excellent fps-boosting DLSS 3 frame insertion feature.
If you’ve not experienced DLSS 3 yet, I’d highly recommend turning it on in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, where the increase to performance is truly transformative.
Speaking of which, the release of the RTX 4070 FE lines up nicely with the latest patch for CD Project RED’s ambitious action-RPG. The 1.62 ‘Overdrive Mode’ update brings full ray traced rendering (or ‘path tracing’) to Cyberpunk 2077.
Even with DLSS 3 enabled though, we doubt you’ll be able to smoothly run Cyberpunk's path tracing patch at resolutions above 1440p on the RTX 4070.
