Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super review: not very super

I had high hopes for the RTX 4070 Ti Super after the RTX 4070 Super impressed me earlier this month. Nvidia’s first RTX 40-series Super card provided some solid performance boosts at both 4K and 1440p — around 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

While the pricing remains the same $799 as the original RTX 4070 Ti it’s replacing, so does the performance. At 1440p on the RTX 4070 Ti Super, I found nearly 3 percent better performance over the original RTX 4070 Ti and around 5 percent at 4K. Nvidia had promised 10 percent, so something has clearly gone wrong here.

Less than two days before this review was due to go live, Nvidia found a problem with the cards that reviewers were testing. “We have discovered an issue with the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16G Ventus 3X GPUs where performance was approximately 5 percent below expected figures on other RTX 4070 Ti SUPER SKUs,” said Nvidia spokesperson Lars Weinand.

Nvidia supplied a VBIOS update, noting that performance still wasn’t up to the promised 10 percent figure. “MSI are continuing to work on updates,” according to Nvidia. The VBIOS update hasn’t made a big difference, and without immediate access to other RTX 4070 Ti Super cards, we have to review based on the current experience with this card.

I’m disappointed Nvidia hasn’t returned with a Founders Edition card for this refreshed GPU. Much like the original RTX 4070 Ti, I’ve been testing a third-party card from MSI. Nvidia is leaving it up to its board partners to supply the cards for the RTX 4070 Ti Super, with the design varying per manufacturer. While I appreciate the diversity of choice available with third-party boards, the Founders Edition cards are well-made and sleekly designed.

MSI’s RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G Ventus 3X uses a triple-fan layout with a copper baseplate and heat pipes to cool the heat from the GPU and memory modules. Like other RTX cards, there’s a zero-RPM mode to stop the fans when temperatures are low, so it keeps your PC quiet if you’re not playing games or stressing the GPU.

This is a fairly typical layout for the RTX 4070 Ti Super, and most third-party cards seem to be going with the triple-fan design. At the rear, there are also the usual three 1.4 DisplayPorts and a single HDMI 2.1 port.

Overall, it’s still a big card, much like RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 variants, but I’m glad to see 16GB of VRAM instead of the 12GB that shipped on the original RTX 4070 Ti. That’s good news for futureproofing and playing at 4K.

Nvidia also hasn’t bumped the power requirements here, so the RTX 4070 Ti Super pulls the same up to 285 watts as the original, 35 less than an RTX 4080. Nvidia still recommends a 750-watt power supply; the latest ATX 3.0 PSUs come with native support for the new PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector that Nvidia uses. I’d recommend this or a third-party cable so you can avoid the chunky power adapter that ships in the box and converts two regular eight-pin PCIe power connections into this new 12-pin connector.

For 1440p testing, I paired the RTX 4070 Ti Super with AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor and Samsung’s 32-inch G7 monitor. This monitor supports refresh rates up to 240Hz as well as Nvidia’s G-Sync technology, so it’s a good test to see if any games can max out this refresh rate.

I put the RTX 4070 Ti Super head-to-head with the previous model, some other RTX 40-series cards, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX, and some previous-generation cards. Tests are performed in a variety of AAA games with max or ultra settings to stress GPUs as much as possible.

Every game managed to hit 100fps or above average, apart from Metro Exodus Enhanced on extreme settings — which is a stress test for most GPUs with the exception of the RTX 4090.

The RTX 4070 Ti Super is less than 3 percent faster than the RTX 4070 Ti before it. As I mentioned earlier, this is super disappointing. It’s barely an improvement over the card it’s replacing, and really, all you’re getting here at 1440p is 16GB of VRAM. Obviously, RTX 4070 Ti owners won’t be upgrading to this anyway, but I was hoping to see closer to the 10 percent that Nvidia promised.

VBIOS updates might help in the future, but right now, that’s the situation with the MSI model we’ve been testing. Third-party cards from other OEMs might well hit that 10 percent mark, though.

In Returnal and Gears 5, the frame rate averages were identical, so there was no improvement whatsoever. Before MSI’s VBIOS update was applied, I actually had the Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti beating the RTX 4070 Ti Super by a slight margin in both of these games.

Much like other RTX 40-series cards, the RTX 4070 Ti Super includes DLSS 3 support. It boosts frames by more than 25 percent in Forza Horizon 5, bringing performance up to the same level as AMD’s $999 Radeon RX 7900 XTX in this particular game.

Elsewhere, the RTX 4070 Ti Super trades blows with the $899 Radeon RX 7900 XT, providing better frame rates in games where RT is enabled and especially where games take advantage of DLSS more often than AMD’s FSR equivalent. But overall, these numbers are still disappointing compared to the RTX 4070 Ti.

For 4K gaming, I tested the RTX 4070 Ti Super with Acer’s 31.5-inch Nitro XV2 monitor. This monitor supports refresh rates up to 144Hz, but the RTX 4070 Ti Super still doesn’t come anywhere close to maxing this monitor out.

Every game managed to reach 60fps or above with settings on ultra or extreme, except Metro Exodus Enhanced running on extreme settings. That makes this an interesting option for 4K, particularly with the improved 16GB of VRAM onboard. If you’re willing to drop the settings down further, then you could max out a 4K 144Hz monitor in a number of games.

Overall, I found very little difference over the original RTX 4070 Ti, though. It’s around 5 percent at 4K, so slightly better than the 1440p scores I recorded. It once again trades blows with AMD’s $899 RX 7900 XT, which AMD has discounted to a promotional price of $749 at some retailers recently in a move that’s clearly a response to Nvidia’s Super cards.

DLSS 3 once again helps at 4K, although it’s a nearly 15 percent bump in Forza Horizon 5 instead of the greater gains I found at 1440p. If you play games that support DLSS 3, then it’s well worth enabling, even if there is a slight tradeoff of increased latency for the frame generation tech.

The RTX 4070 Ti Super has been a difficult card to review thanks to the VBIOS issues. We decided to publish at embargo time to offer an opinion on this MSI model, but we’ll certainly be back with updates (and a score) once we get to test another card to see what the performance should be.

Nvidia promised a 10 percent performance bump over the RTX 4070 Ti, but that hasn’t materialized yet in the testing we’re able to perform right now. It’s possible it will with other cards and with future VBIOS updates for this MSI model. Nvidia sent us an Asus card to test, but most cards go on sale today, and I cannot recommend purchasing the MSI variant until the VBIOS issues are fully addressed.

If the 10 percent performance improvement is apparent on other cards, the pricing of the RTX 4070 Ti Super is still awkward. The original RTX 4070 Ti’s $799 pricing was always controversial, and it feels like there’s no competition in this part of the market. $699 used to get you an RTX 3080 if you were very lucky, but the GPU market has changed a lot since then and has pushed prices up. The main AMD competition at this price point is the RX 7900 XT — but only because of “promotional pricing” that means it has dropped from $899 to $749 at some retailers recently. At the time of review, you can pick one up at Best Buy for $759.99 or even at $739.99 at Newegg.

The performance difference between an RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super is around 10 percent — but at more than 30 percent in price. If you’re weighing an RTX 4070 Super against an RTX 4080 Super, then the performance jump will be at least 30 percent (based on RTX 4080 benchmarks) but at around 66 percent more in price, if the $999 holds. At the RTX 4070 Ti Super price point, there’s less obvious value, especially when it straddles the line between high refresh rate 1440p gaming and 4K gaming at lower refresh rates.

This all puts a lot of pressure on this RTX 4070 Ti Super launch, particularly because we still don’t know exactly what the RTX 4080 Super will deliver for that extra $200 above. Given that it’s not always been easy to find an RTX 4070 Ti for $799 right now, I think some will be holding out hope for the RTX 4080 Super’s $999 pricing, if they can even find cards at that level.

We’ll be back with a review of the RTX 4080 Super next week, but right now, I can’t give an informed opinion on the value of the RTX 4070 Ti Super until the performance situation is clear.

Photography by Tom Warren / The Verge