RTX 4070 Ti vs RTX 3070 Ti – Worth Upgrading?
NVIDIA’s most recent generation is seen as a bit of a flop with a number of the new cards being worryingly close in terms of performance to their last gen counterparts, and often being significantly beaten on price by older cards too. The 4070 Ti is a bit of an interesting one though – if you didn’t know, NVIDIA actually planned on releasing this as the RTX 4080 12GB. They were going to have two RTX 4080’s on launch, and importantly here, they weren’t just the same card but with less VRAM like both NVIDIA and AMD have done in the past, no they were completely different GPUs. This, now rebranded, RTX 4070 Ti 12GB card has significantly fewer cores – enough that most would argue this doesn’t even really qualify for the 4070 Ti name either, let alone the 4080 moniker. With that said though, especially with some driver updates, is the RTX 4070 Ti actually worth buying, especially compared to its last gen counterpart, the 3070 Ti? Let’s test them and find out!
Spec wise, the 4070 Ti is rocking 25% more CUDA Cores at 7680 versus the 6144 you get on a 3070 Ti, and importantly these days has 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM compared to just 8GB on the older card. That isn’t exactly a great deal though, as I’d argue both should have come with considerably more anyway. One interesting note here though is that the 3070 Ti actually has a considerably wider memory bus width at 256 bits compared to just 192 bits on the 4070 Ti. That means fewer bits can be transmitted at any one time, basically less data can get from that VRAM to the GPU. Now NVIDIA has bumped up the memory clock from 1188MHz to 1313MHz, but that’s still about 20% slower overall when you consider the 10% clock speed boost, but the 33% smaller memory bus. So you get more memory, but you can’t access it as fast. Amazing.
Performance wise, at 1440p you can expect a reasonable amount more performance. Cyberpunk on medium settings has the 4070 Ti at 183 FPS average, whereas the 3070 Ti is down at 144 FPS. That’s 28% faster, a pretty sizable performance advantage. Interestingly the 1% lows actually aren’t any better, so while you do get more performance, it’s less stable performance.
Happily in Shadow of the Tomb Raider on high settings, both results rise with I think the biggest performance delta at 45% more from the 4070 Ti, netting 228 FPS average versus 158 FPS. Equally the 1% lows rose as well, going from 124 FPS to 165 FPS. That’s great news.
Fortnite isn’t quite as impressive with just 19% more performance from the newer generation card. You go from 171 FPS to 204 FPS – a difference you’d struggle to notice even on a 240Hz 1440p monitor! The 1% lows rising from 96 FPS to 126 FPS might be more noticeable though, especially as that is a 31% increase – a decent bit higher than the average performance increase.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is a similar story on the averages, jumping from 112 FPS average, to 135 FPS. That is a more noticeable difference, and means if you don’t mind slightly less performance you have the horsepower to crank up the visual fidelity without sacrificing too much. The 1% lows don’t move quite as much, going from 90 FPS to 98 FPS.
Hitman 3 has one of the larger differences at 36% more performance on average, going from 180 FPS to 246 FPS. That’s pretty impressive – and that is looking at the GPU specific performance the built in benchmark provides. The 1% lows follow suit, with a 25% uplift going from 126 to 158 FPS.
Lastly in Rainbow 6 Siege, there’s actually a pretty surprising difference in performance – over 100 FPS no less! It’s still “only” 31% faster, but going from 385 FPS to 506 FPS seems like a pretty big deal. That’s on the medium preset, so again if you wanted to crank up the visual quality you are unlikely to be dipping anywhere near your monitor’s refresh rate, let alone to unplayable levels.
On average the 4070 Ti I have here – this MSI Suprim X card which is absolutely massive by the way – is about 25% faster than this Asus STRIX RTX 3070 Ti at 1440p. I did also benchmark at 1080p just to see, but with this much horsepower most of the games became CPU bound, meaning the 4070 Ti only ran about 10% faster on average. The big catch here of course is the price tag. This MSI Suprim X card retails for £950. Basically £1000 for a 4070 Ti. That’s frankly insane. Even using a more reasonable card as a price benchmark, you’re looking at £800 on the lower end, compared to around £500 for a new 3070 Ti. If you are willing to buy a used card, 3070 Ti’s can be had for more like £350 to £400, which means they are basically half the price of a new 4070 Ti. You do only get 8GB of VRAM, but of course you could always buy a higher end used card like a 3080 Ti with the same 12GB of VRAM, although it has an even wider bus width of 384 bits so you might actually be able to make use of it! Hell, a used 3090 is only £700 or so, making it considerably cheaper than one of these 4070 Ti’s AND it comes with 24GB of VRAM and a whole lot more horsepower.
In short then, despite the 4070 Ti being a rebadged 4080 class card, the value proposition puts it up against some of the highest end cards from the last generation, and it really doesn’t stack up all that well. It’s not exactly that much faster than the 3070 Ti, and for effectively double the price even comparing new to new, it’s really really hard to recommend this. At half the price it’d be a great deal, but it isn’t.
