Conclusions
The review today evaluated the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC 12G. This video card was tested in 4K gaming at the highest settings, with and without RayTracing enabled. We looked at a few selected games in 4K Ray Tracing at 1440p as well. The GIGABYTE RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC was also overclocked. As a comparison card, we chose the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT which is (at this writing) the same price point.
Performance
We have seen in our previous two reviews of the RX 7900 XT (here and here) that this video card is very fast and capable in plain rasterized gaming. This was borne out again today. Not to imply the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC is inadequate, but once again this part of the competition went to the RED team. The RX 7900 XT was over 10% faster and 19% faster with upscaling. That is a pretty nice bump right there. Once again we see that all but one game, the video cards we used today ran playable FPS without any help at the highest 4K settings. Even better performance was obtained with DLSS or FSR.
Ray Tracing does turn the tables in the review. There needs to be an asterisk applied though. Neither of the video cards was able to reach a playable FPS in any of these games except one at 4K Ray Traced. Two-thirds of the test suite was playable with upscaling. The GIGABYTE RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC does enjoy a 19% lead here and a 25% boost over the RX 7900 XT with upscaling. However, it seems safe to say, these two video cards are just not 4K gamers with all the buttons pushed.
Our next group of tests demonstrates just that point. At 1440p the GIGABYTE RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC gets to show you want it’s got. Here we see the margin with Ray Tracing enabled jump to 25% and further to 31% upscaled. At this resolution, one way or the other, the GIGABYTE RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC reaches very playable FPS results. This section does well to showcase that the RTX 4070 Ti and the RX 7900 XT are well suited for gaming with all the additives at 1440p. As we have emphasized all along, if you simply dial one setting down, you can enjoy all the graphics the developers meant for you to see at good frame rates.
But wait…..what does this button do?
Like any gamer or technology enthusiast, we all come up to a situation where we see a new button or setting and just have to see what happens. In this review, it was NVIDIA Frame Generation. Certainly discussed plenty when the RTX 4000 series was released, but we hadn’t really stopped to see what the effect is yet. For a technical discussion check here. So in a nutshell, the tensor cores in the RTX 4000 series can generate entirely new frames to increase performance. Free frames…..who doesn’t like free.
This technology is available currently in F1 2022, Dying Light 2, and Cyberpunk 2007 of our gaming suite. So we pushed the button. All three games were trialed at 4K “Ultra”, DLSS Quality enabled. In F1 2022 the FPS increased by 16% (83->97), Dying Light 2 saw no appreciable changes, and Cyberpunk 2077 gained 44% (45->65). It seems this technology is pretty slick. We did not see any downside. The game looked great and the boost was very nice, especially in Cyberpunk.
Overclocking and Cooling
Overclocking the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC was very straightforward. (Once we figured out the nuance of the software) We used the GIGABYTE Control Center. It seems this has replaced the Aorus Engine and is very similar to other manufacturers’ one-stop control centers. With it you can control fans, RGB, and overclocking on all your GIGABYTE hardware.
We were able to increase the GPU clock 125MHz resulting in a 13% Boost over the default out-of-box frequency. The memory overclocked well at +1000MHz. We even held at 3000MHz about half of the benchmark run-through. Unfortunately, this boost did not translate into much in real-time game testing. The best we could do was a 5% gain and the average was closer to 3%. As was discussed we did reach +150MHz and Boosted to 3030MHz but one game was not stable.
Cooling on the GIGABYTE RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC is excellent. If you review the sensor data you will see the GPU temperatures were very low as were the memory, even overclocked. This is no doubt due to the big heatsink on the card. Overall, this heatsink and overall card dimension rival the RTX 4080 and 4090. GIGABYTE also equips this video card with very efficient and quiet fans. The Windforce fans were audible at 77% but not to the point of being annoying. As we stated earlier if this was the case it would not be obvious under our test conditions. We never had to touch the settings. AUTO did just fine.
Final Points
The review today ran the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC 12G through our testing protocol against a SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. As expected the RX 7900 XT bested the GIGABYTE RTX 4070 TI OC at 4K in plain raster performance. In Ray Tracing it was the other way around, but a weak performance at 4K. At 1440p you can definitely set everything on “ultra” including Ray Tracing. It honestly seems this video card’s full potential shows at 1440p not 4K. That being said, as Frame Generation is further adopted, things may change. Overclocking is a little lacking, but the cooling and fan setup is first-class.
Given the current price point, if you are wanting Ray Tracing and the new DLSS 3 technology this GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC is worth a look.