Conclusion
Our review looked at the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB compared to the closest price and performance video cards, the XFX Speedster MERC RX 7900 XT Black Edition and the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC. We chose 1440p and 4K gaming. In 1440p we added ray tracing as well. We also gave overclocking a go.
Performance
In plain rasterized gameplay, the Radeon RX video cards continue their dominance. At 4K we see this grouping of cards is playable without upscaling in 4 (arguably 5) of 6 games and in all of the games with upscaling enabled. Actually, the FPS is quite high in 4 of 6 games natively. The XFX Speedster MERC 310 RX 7900 XT Black Edition does carry the day in all but Chernobylite EE by an average of 8%. The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB maintains that same 8% margin over the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC.
Moving down a notch to 1440p gameplay, the XFX Speedster MERC RX 7900 XT Black Edition is still the king but the margin slips to 6.75%. All games are playable, however, natively. Also, the FPS are mostly over 100. If you look at upscaling the FPS becomes simply crazy fast and not really needed for smooth enjoyable gameplay. The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB has a 6% better FPS versus the GIGABYTE RTX 4070 TI Gaming OC.
With Ray Tracing enabled at 1440p, the tide turns in the favor of the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB. The XFX Speedster MERC RX 7900 XT Black Edition is bested by 20% and the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC by 8% on average. 3 of 6 games are playable natively and all the games are playable upscaled. The upscaled results are actually quite fast, with most games topping 100FPS for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB. All in all, this is a very strong showing in 1440p ray tracing.
As an overall observation, one can see that the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB is a very capable video card both in rasterized and ray traced-enabled gaming. It provides fast framerates in nearly all games and hits every mark using upscaling. You can expect a great experience at 1440p and quite good at 4K if you are willing to compromise the ray tracing settings a little bit.
Overclocking
Quite honestly, there wasn’t much to do here due to the locks put on the VCore and the power limiter. Using the GIGABYTE Control Center software adjustment was made to the GPU frequency and the Memory frequency. Our final settings were 2825MHz (+200) and 22.5GBps (+1500). This did result in our GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB running at 3000MHz during our benchmark. All in all this translates to a real-time 4-5% uplift in performance.
As we demonstrated in the power charting, the GPU hits the power limit when overclocked and just sneaks by it to about 101% TDP. If we could adjust the power slider there might be a little more left in the tank. Overall the heatsink and fans on the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB worked very well to keep the video card cool. All testing was done on “automatic” and the fans were not audible. When we did set them at 90% they were noisy. In fact anything above 60% would be audible most likely, but not an issue on “automatic”.
We did find that MSI Afterburner’s latest beta version has the ability to up the VCore, but given the absolute power limit of 100%, it would probably not benefit. Overall, the GIGABYTE Control Center was easy to use and understand.
Final Points
The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER WINDFORCE OC 16GB represents the least appointed of GIGABYTE’s offerings in the 4070 Ti SUPER lineup. That being said the card is well built, runs cool, overclocks well, and is small and quiet. The performance is about 6% over the standard RTX 4070 Ti and it has more VRAM on a wider bus. This card is a great performer at 1440p. You can run full tilt. At 4K you may have to pick and choose with ray tracing, but it’s entirely doable. Selling at MSRP, this is an enthusiast-class video card worth taking a hard look at.
