Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 is launching today, with availability on March 5th, 2025, with an MSRP of $549. Today, we reviewed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition model, which is the $549 model. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 is NVIDIA’s next-down-the-stack GPU from the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti that falls within the GeForce RTX 50 series Blackwell family of GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 is based on the GB205 die and contains 12GB of GDDR7 with support for new DLSS 4 features like Multi-Frame Generation.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE has 6,144 CUDA Cores, 192 5th Gen Tensor Cores, 48 4th Gen RT Cores, 80 ROPs, and 192 Texture Units. It is equipped with 12GB of GDDR7 at 28Gbps on a 192-bit memory bus, giving it 672GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU Boost is set at 2512MHz, and it has a TGP of 250W. The Founders Edition design is a small 9.5″ in length, and a 2-slot card design using a dual-fan cooling solution. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition model uses NVIDIA’s custom cooling solution with an air pass-through on half of the video card and a fully enclosed, well-built, and sturdy video card. This video card will fit very nicely in small builds.
Game Performance
We focused on the 1440p gameplay experience on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE for raster and RT performance, though we did have to drop some games to 1080p with Ray Tracing. We also tested DLSS Upscaling performance at Quality in all scenarios to see how that would improve the experience. For comparison, we used the previous generation GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER ($599 MSRP) and GeForce RTX 4070 (new MSRP $549) as well as the Radeon RX 7800 XT for comparison.
In Alan Wake 2, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE provided a playable experience at 1440p with the highest settings. However, it was only on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER in performance, just a 1% difference, though it was 18% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. In Black Myth Wukong, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was not playable at 1440p at Cinematic quality, we did need to enable DLSS Upscaling to get to 60 FPS. In this game, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was 8% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and 27% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070.
Cyberpunk 2077 was a big outlier for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE, where it showed a larger performance uplift over the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. In this game, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was playable at 1440p and Ultra and was 17% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and 51% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. Dying Light 2 was another game where the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE had a decent uplift over the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, by 11% in this game, and 34% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070.
In F1 24 we actually experienced a regression in performance, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE being 8% slower than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and only 7% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. Horizon Forbidden West, like other games, showed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE performing on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER with a 2% difference but 19% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. Indiana Jones was also only 5% with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE over the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, but 17% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. At least these games were very playable without needing Upscaling, the gameplay experience was good.
In Kingdom Come Deliverance II, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was also playable without Upscaling and very smooth with it. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was just 8% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and 32% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. Stalker 2 was another game where the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE was just on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, a 2% difference. It was playable without Upscaling, barely, but with DLSS, the game was smooth. Star Wars Outlaws finished out the games with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE once again being on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER on performance and being playable.
Ray Tracing Performance
Ray Tracing performance was a very mixed bag, with mostly regressions or stagnation in performance in regards to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE. Alan Wake 2 started off rough, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE having an 8% regression in performance compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. It was only 10% faster than the GeForce RTX 4070. This meant the game was not playable, even with Quality DLSS. it was on the border, you would need to lower the quality of DLSS to make it playable at 1440p to Balanced DLSS Upscaling.
Black Myth Wukong was naturally disturbingly graphically intense with Very High RT enabled. Even when we lowered the game resolution to 1080p, this game was not playable on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE. When we enabled DLSS Upscaling, we only barely hit 60 FPS average, which means the minimums are under 60 FPS. The worse part, though, is that Ray Tracing performance was not improved with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE over the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER; it was within 3% of the performance.
Even in Cyberpunk 2077, with Ultra Ray Tracing enabled at 1440p, this game was not playable without DLSS Upscaling. However, at least it was actually playable with Quality DLSS Upscaling at 1440p in the 70s FPS range. The downside is that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE is once again just on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER in Ray Tracing performance, at a 1.3% difference, with no performance uplift.
Dying Light 2 was unique in that we did see a 6% performance uplift compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. This game was also playable at 1440p with Ray Tracing without needing DLSS Upscaling, and with it, performance was above 100 FPS, so for this game, good news. F1 24, though, showed another regression on Ray Tracing performance, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE being 7% slower than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, though it was playable at 1440p without DLSS Upscaling. Finally, Star Wars Outlaws showed another regression at 7% slower with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. Even at just 1080p, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 FE requires DLSS Upscaling to be playable in Star Wars Outlaws with Ultra Ray Tracing.
Of Dies and SKUs
It has been very interesting reviewing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition, its almost as if we’ve seen this before- oh wait, we have, the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. The GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER was a refresh card, released in January of 2024 at an MSRP of $599. It did not replace the GeForce RTX 4070 but did supersceed it, moving the GeForce RTX 4070 down to $549 MSRP officially. The GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER are based on the same AD104 die, with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER utilizing the full-spec of that die, therefore shader, raster, RT, and tensor performance did increase a good deal, though it utilized the same 12GB GDDR6X VRAM configuration and memory bandwidth.
The GeForce RTX 5070, interestingly, utilizes the GB205 die, departing from traditionally what the “xx70” series of GPUs is based on, and definitely departing from the previous generation in this regard. We do know that the GB205 die used in the GeForce RTX 5070 is not the full-spec of this die, so perhaps there is room for a “SUPER” refresh in the future, but that is just speculation. At any rate, at $549 MSRP, the GeForce RTX 5070 can be compared to both the GeForce RTX 4070 (which did initially launch at a $599 MSRP) and also the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER with a $599 MSRP. This is all relative anyway, as street prices will be different on both ends.
Final Points
Based on our performance, our summary is that in Raster Performance, the new GeForce RTX 5070 is on par, or even slightly less, the performance of the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, in Ray Tracing performance the GeForce RTX 5070 is a regression in performance compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, and in Compute Performance the GeForce RTX 5070 is faster than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER.
Those upgrading from the GeForce RTX 30 series or less will find a bigger impact moving up to the GeForce RTX 5070 in the experience. The number of games where the RTX 5070 had an uplift over the RTX 4070 SUPER was less than the ones where it was on par in our gaming suite. The GeForce RTX 5070 also uses more power than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER to only provide equal or lesser performance, except in some specific gaming scenarios where compute is more utilized.
Raytracing and Raster performance are a bit stagnant, even regressing slightly. In all previous generations since the RTX 20 series, RT performance has improved; it seems like this is the first generation that it has not in this price range. It also seems that raster performance has stagnated here or even regressed in some games, yet in some outliers like Cyberpunk 2077, the uplift was larger. The range is quite wide here in terms of performance; depending on the game, the average experience was on par compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER.
The 12GB of VRAM capacity on the GeForce RTX 5070 is stagnation in this price range, with no movement or progress. The industry is not being moved forward for gamers, and the gameplay experience is not being moved forward for gamers at this price range in this generation. It could hinder game development for an enjoyable gameplay experience in future game titles. It is clear that in 2025 and moving forward, and for the life of this video card, at this price range, 16GB of VRAM is preferred.
In summary, the GeForce RTX 5070 is a GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER with on par, or sometimes slightly less raster performance, slightly less ray tracing performance, but faster compute performance, and a higher power demand. On the plus side, at least our GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition has all its ROPs.