Introduction

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC graphics card is the company's value custom-design implementation of NVIDIA's latest performance-segment graphics card from its RTX 40-series "Ada Lovelace" generation. The RTX 4070 Ti is designed to strike a price-performance sweetspot at a starting price of $800 (NVIDIA baseline), while being able to play games at resolutions as high as 4K Ultra HD, where you can benefit from features such as DLSS 3 frame-generation, to nearly max-out the eye-candy of your game. The Gaming OC brand from Gigabyte comes under the main marquee, positioned a notch below the flashy and feature-rich AORUS Gaming products by the company. These cards are designed to cover all the essentials of the GPU for gamers that just want to install the card and get gaming, which is why it is priced close to NVIDIA's baseline price.



The new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is originally what would have been the GeForce RTX 4080 12 GB, before NVIDIA decided to cancel and re-brand it into the RTX 4070 Ti, in wake of fierce criticism from gamers and the media regarding the name. NVIDIA originally announced the RTX 4080 12 GB alongside the RTX 4080 16 GB, and memory size was hardly the only differentiator between the two. The 12 GB variant has 21% fewer shaders/RT cores/Tensor cores; and besides the lower memory size, it also has a 25% narrower 192-bit memory interface (which was at the heart of the controversy, given that NVIDIA planned to sell the card originally at $900). This is anyway water under the bridge, as the company re-branded it to the RTX 4070 Ti, and trimmed the starting price down to $800 (which is still higher than the launch price of the RTX 3080). The RTX 4080 16 GB would go on to be called simply the "RTX 4080."

The new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti debuts NVIDIA's third silicon based on the "Ada Lovelace" graphics architecture, the 5 nm "AD104," which the SKU maxes out, enabling all 60 streaming multiprocessors (SM), which works out to 7,680 CUDA cores, 60 RT cores, 240 Tensor cores, 240 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The card is endowed with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 192-bit memory bus, running at 21 Gbps, which works out to 504 GB/s memory bandwidth (which is exactly half that of the RTX 4090, and two-thirds that of the RTX 3080. NVIDIA improved the memory sub-system at the architecture level with "Ada," by deploying larger on-die caches at various levels, so one shouldn't read too much into the generationally reduced memory bandwidth.

The Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC features a similar design to the company's RTX 4080 Gaming OC card, but with the WindForce 3X cooler being slimmer at 2.7-slots, compared to 3.5-slots. The cooler still has some premium touches, such as a two-tone metal finish, and some RGB lighting elements around the fan-intakes and the top of the card. You get a small factory-overclock out of the box, with the GPU Boost set at 2640 MHz, compared to 2610 MHz reference. NVIDIA is standardizing the 16-pin ATX 12VHPWR connector across the series, and this SKU gets one that is signal pin keyed to 300 W. This is just a means to tell the graphics card that the connector can supply no more than 300 W continuous, there's no physical difference with a standard 12VHPWR. An NVIDIA-designed adapter is included, which converts two 8-pin PCIe connectors to one of these. Gigabyte is pricing the RTX 4070 Ti close to the $800 baseline MSRP.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 10x RTX 4070 Ti Super

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.

Architecture

The Ada graphics architecture heralds the third generation of the NVIDIA RTX technology, an effort toward increasing the realism of game visuals by leveraging real-time ray tracing, without the enormous amount of compute power required to draw purely ray-traced 3D graphics. This is done by blending conventional raster graphics with ray traced elements such as reflections, lighting, and global illumination, to name a few. The 3rd generation of RTX introduces the new higher IPC "Ada" CUDA core, 3rd generation RT core, 4th generation Tensor core, and the new Optical Flow Processor, a component that plays a key role in generating new frames without involving the GPU's main graphics rendering pipeline.


The GeForce Ada graphics architecture driving the RTX 4070 Ti leverages the TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry process to increase transistor counts. At the heart of this GPU is the new AD104 silicon, which has a fairly high transistor count of 35.8 billion, which is more than double that of the previous-generation GA104. The GPU features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface, and a 192-bit wide GDDR6X memory bus, which on the RTX 4070 Ti wires out to 12 GB of memory. The Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA) is an independent top-level component. The chip features two NVENC and one NVDEC units in the GeForce RTX 40-series, letting you run two independent video encoding streams (useful for game-streamers).

The essential component hierarchy is similar to past generations of NVIDIA GPUs. The AD104 silicon features 5 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), each of these has all the SIMD and graphics rendering machinery, and is a small GPU in its own right. Each GPC shares a raster engine (geometry processing components) and two ROP partitions (each with eight ROP units). The GPC of the AD104 contains six Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), the main number-crunching machinery. Each of these has two Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), and a Polymorph unit. Each SM contains 128 CUDA cores across four partitions. Half of these CUDA cores are pure-FP32; while the other half is capable of FP32 or INT32. The SM retains concurrent FP32+INT32 math processing capability. The SM also contains a 3rd generation RT core, four 4th generation Tensor cores, some cache memory, and four TMUs. There are 12 SM per GPC, so 1,536 CUDA cores, 48 Tensor cores, and 12 RT cores; per GPC. There are five such GPCs, which add up to 7,680 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, 240 Tensor Cores, and 60 RT cores. Each GPC contributes 16 ROPs, so there are 80 ROPs on the silicon. The RTX 4070 Ti maxes out the AD104 silicon.


The 3rd generation RT core accelerates the most math-intensive aspects of real-time ray tracing, including BVH traversal. Displaced micro-mesh engine is a revolutionary feature introduced with the new 3rd generation RT core. Just as mesh shaders and tessellation have had a profound impact on improving performance with complex raster geometry, allowing game developers to significantly increase geometric complexity; DMMs is a method to reduce the complexity of the bounding-volume hierarchy (BVH) data-structure, which is used to determine where a ray hits geometry. Previously, the BVH had to capture even the smallest details to properly determine the intersection point. Ada's ray tracing architecture also receives a major performance uplift from Shader Execution Reordering (SER), a software-defined feature that requires awareness from game-engines, to help the GPU reorganize and optimize worker threads associated with ray tracing.


The BVH now needn't have data for every single triangle on an object, but can represent objects with complex geometry as a coarse mesh of base triangles, which greatly simplifies the BVH data structure. A simpler BVH means less memory consumed and helps to greatly reduce ray tracing CPU load, because the CPU only has to generate a smaller structure. With older "Ampere" and "Turing" RT cores, each triangle on an object had to be sampled at high overhead, so the RT core could precisely calculate ray intersection for each triangle. With Ada, the simpler BVH, plus the displacement maps can be sent to the RT core, which is now able to figure out the exact hit point on its own. NVIDIA has seen 11:1 to 28:1 compression in total triangle counts. This reduces BVH compile times by 7.6x to over 15x, in comparison to the older RT core; and reducing its storage footprint by anywhere between 6.5 to 20 times. DMMs could reduce disk- and memory bandwidth utilization, utilization of the PCIe bus, as well as reduce CPU utilization. NVIDIA worked with Simplygon and Adobe to add DMM support for their tool chains.


Opacity Micro Meshes (OMM) is a new feature introduced with Ada to improve rasterization performance, particularly with objects that have alpha (transparency data). Most low-priority objects in a 3D scene, such as leaves on a tree, are essentially rectangles with textures on the leaves where the transparency (alpha) creates the shape of the leaf. RT cores have a hard time intersecting rays with such objects, because they're not really in the shape that they appear (they're really just rectangles with textures that give you the illusion of shape). Previous-generation RT cores had to have multiple interactions with the rendering stage to figure out the shape of a transparent object, because they couldn't test for alpha by themselves.


This has been solved by using OMMs. Just as DMMs simplify geometry by creating meshes of micro-triangles; OMMs create meshes of rectangular textures that align with parts of the texture that aren't alpha, so the RT core has a better understanding of the geometry of the object, and can correctly calculate ray intersections. This has a significant performance impact on shading performance in non-RT applications, too. Practical applications of OMMs aren't just low-priority objects such as vegetation, but also smoke-sprites and localized fog. Traditionally there was a lot of overdraw for such effects, because they layered multiple textures on top of each other, that all had to be fully processed by the shaders. Now only the non-opaque pixels get executed—OMMs provide a 30 percent speedup with graphics buffer fill-rates, and a 10 percent impact on frame-rates.


DLSS 3 introduces a revolutionary new feature that promises a doubling in frame-rate at comparable quality, it's called AI frame-generation. While it has all the features of DLSS 2 and its AI super-resolution (scaling up a lower-resolution frame to native resolution with minimal quality loss); DLSS 3 can generate entire frames simply using AI, without involving the graphics rendering pipeline. Later in the article, we will show you DLSS 3 in action.


Every alternating frame with DLSS 3 is hence AI-generated, without being a replica of the previous rendered frame. This is possible only on the Ada graphics architecture, because of a hardware component called the optical flow accelerator (OFA), which assists in predicting what the next frame could look like, by creating what NVIDIA calls an optical flow-field. OFA ensures that the DLSS 3 algorithm isn't confused by static objects in a rapidly-changing 3D scene (such as a race sim). The process heavily relies on the performance uplift introduced by the FP8 math format of the 4th generation Tensor core. A third key ingredient of DLSS 3 is Reflex. By reducing the rendering queue to zero, Reflex plays a vital role in ensuring that frame-times with DLSS 3 are at an acceptable level, and a render-queue doesn't confuse the upscaler. A combination of OFA and the 4th Gen Tensor core is why the Ada architecture is required to use DLSS 3, and why it won't work on older architectures.

Packaging

The Card

The front of the Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC is mostly black, with silvery highlights on the fan hub. On the back you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.


Gigabyte has installed RGB illumination on the fans, but the lighting is tied into the fan's PWM signal. So, if the fans are stopped there is no lighting. Near the top right there's a second RGB element.


Dimensions of the card are 33.5 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1537 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere).

NVIDIA introduces the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are now two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 2x PCIe 8-pin is included. Of course the 4x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cables from RTX 4090 will also work with the RTX 4070 Ti.


Near the power connector, Gigabyte has placed their dual BIOS switch, which lets you switch from the default "OC" BIOS, to a "Silent" BIOS, with a much more relaxed fan curve.

Teardown

The main heatsink provides cooling for the GPU chip, memory chips and VRM circuitry. Unlike many other cards which use a classic heatsink baseplate, Gigabyte has installed a vapor-chamber baseplate, which soaks up the heat and moves it to the heatpipes quickly. Seven heatpipes then transfer heat to the cooling fins.


The backplate is made from metal, it protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.


High-resolution versions are also available (front, back).