Introduction

NVIDIA today launches the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, the second in its three part series of new high-end graphics cards bearing the SUPER brand extension. The three form a mid lifecycle refresh for the GeForce RTX 40-series Ada generation, and are developed to offer more performance at existing price points. The new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER comes in at a starting price of $800, which is exactly the same as the RTX 4070 Ti, which the company will retire from its lineup. At its price, the new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER offers more shaders, and other on-die components; but more importantly, comes with a major upgrade to its memory sub-system. Unlike the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER from last week, there is no NVIDIA Founders Edition graphics card for the RTX 4070 SUPER in existence, and so we have with us the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3X, a custom design card from MSI that you will find at the NVIDIA MSRP, which covers all the basics, and has everything you need if you're in the market for an RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. This card was sampled to us by NVIDIA, and comes both at baseline pricing, as well as reference clock speeds.



NVIDIA had originally launched the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti as the "RTX 4080 12 GB," which it had to rename as the naming caused some controversy owing to its significantly different specs from the then "RTX 4080 16 GB," which went onto be known simply as the RTX 4080. The company had maxed out all available shaders on the 5 nm AD104 GPU to create the RTX 4070 Ti, and so to create the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, it's tapping into the larger AD103 silicon powering the RTX 4080 and the upcoming RTX 4080 SUPER that you'll hear more about next week. The AD103 gives NVIDIA as many as 33% more shaders than the AD104, spread across 80 streaming multiprocessors; but more importantly, features a wider 256-bit GDDR6X memory bus, compared to the 192-bit bus of the AD104 that powers the original RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070 SUPER, and the original RTX 4070. This increase in memory bus width, along with a few more shaders, sits at the core of the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER.

The new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER comes with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory across the full 256-bit bus width of the AD103 silicon. The memory ticks at 21 Gbps, yielding 672 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a significant 33% increase compared to the 504 GB/s of the original RTX 4070 Ti. NVIDIA carved the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER out of the AD103 by enabling 66 out of 80 streaming multiprocessors, which is a 10% increase over the original RTX 4070 Ti. This results in 8,448 CUDA cores, 268 Tensor cores, 66 RT cores, and 262 TMUs. There are, however, two major on-die changes compared to the RTX 4080. NVIDIA enabled 96 out of the 112 ROPs physically present on the AD103; which is still a 20% increase over the 80 ROPs of the RTX 4070 Ti. The other change is the on-die L2 cache. From the 64 MB available on the AD103, NVIDIA enabled just 48 MB of it. This is the same amount of cache as the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 SUPER. NVIDIA has given the RTX 4070 Ti a total graphics power (TGP) power limit of 285 W, which is the same as the RTX 4070 Ti. This power limit isn't all that far from the 320 W of the RTX 4080.

The SUPER moniker denotes more performance at given price points, it doesn't indicate the introduction of any new architecture level features. The GeForce Ada Lovelace architecture introduces the 3rd generation of RTX real time ray tracing technology. Its new generation CUDA core, in addition to support for higher frequencies and increased IPC, introduces shader execution reordering, a tech that should speed up ray tracing workloads. The new 3rd generation RT core, in addition to increased ray intersection performance, supports displaced micro-meshes, which allows greater complexity for ray traced objects. Lastly, the new optical flow processor is needed for DLSS 3 Frame Generation to work.

NVIDIA is positioning the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER as a 1440p graphics card. These kind of specs are frankly overkill for 1440p, given that even the regular RTX 4070 can provide around 60 FPS. What the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER does, however, is enable high refresh-rate 1440p gameplay. There are plenty of well priced 1440p displays with 144 Hz or 165 Hz refresh rates these days, and if the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER averages close to 3-digit FPS, then these displays have enough frame-rate to go on for a superior gaming experience compared to 60 Hz monitors. As with even the regular All the three RTX 4070-series cards we've tested before this one are capable of 4K gaming even though NVIDIA doesn't recommend it; and so the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER should only be more capable of 4K. You have GeForce Experience, which can pick the right game settings for you, and then there are always DLSS and DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

The MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3X features a pretty spartan design, with a 2-tone black+silver cooler shroud that's a callback to some of the older NVIDIA Founders Edition cards. The card is three slots thick, and looks fairly premium when installed in your machine. It sticks to NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 2610 MHz boost, and 21 Gbps memory. The power limit is set at the NVIDIA reference 285 W. The card draws power from a 12VHPWR connector, an adapter is included that converts two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to one of these. MSI is pricing this card at the NVIDIA MSRP of $800.

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 SUPER leverages the TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry process to increase transistor counts.



The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER gets a significant memory sub-system uplift over the original RTX 4070 Ti, besides an increase in shaders and other on-die components. Since NVIDIA maxed out the AD104 to create the RTX 4070 Ti, the only way it could go about creating the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is by tapping into the larger AD103 that powers the RTX 4080 and the upcoming RTX 4080 SUPER. The biggest perks of the switch to AD103 is its wider 256-bit memory bus, which allowed NVIDIA to increase the memory from 12 GB to 16 GB.

The AD103 is built on the 5 nm EUV foundry process, with a die size of 379 mm² and 45.9 billion transistors. The chip features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface along with support for PCI resizable BAR; and its 256-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface. The GigaThread Engine serves as the main workflow controller for the GPU, dispatching work among the GPU's 7 graphics processing clusters (GPCs). Each GPC shares a Raster Engine and render backends among six texture processing clusters (TPCs), the indivisible subunit of the GPU. 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. One of the 7 GPCs on the AD103 physically only has 4 TPCs.

With a total of 40 TPCs, or 80 SM, the AD103 physically features 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, and 320 TMUs; along with 64 MB of on-die L2 cache, and 112 ROPs. NVIDIA carved the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER out of the AD103 by enabling 66 out of 80 SM, 48 MB out of the 64 MB of L2 cache present; and 96 ROPs out of the 112 present. This results in 8,448 CUDA cores, 264 Tensor cores, 66 RT cores, 264 TMUs, 96 ROPs, and 48 MB of L2 cache. NVIDIA also disabled a few NVDEC units, giving this the same exact video acceleration configuration as the RTX 4070 Ti, with two NVENC and one NVDEC units. The 256-bit memory interface drives 16 GB of memory, however the memory runs at 21 Gbps, compared to the 22.5 Gbps of the RTX 4080, and 23 Gbps of the upcoming RTX 4080 SUPER. Even with 21 Gbps, the memory bandwidth on tap is an impressive 672 GB/s, a 33% increase over that of the original RTX 4070 Ti.

3rd Gen RT Core and Ray Tracing

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

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 Frame Generation

DLSS 3 introduces a revolutionary new feature that promises a doubling in frame-rate at comparable quality, it's called AI frame-generation. Building on 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, it's also possible to enable frame generation at native resolution without upscaling. 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 latency with DLSS 3 enabled is at an acceptable level. 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

MSI's RTX 4070 Ventus 3X comes with the same silvery look that we've seen on the company's other Ventus GeForce 40 cards. Compared to their GeForce 30 Ventus units, the silver color is more pronounced now. On the other side you'll find a plastic backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 31 x 12 cm, and it weighs 1084 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 53 mm.


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

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada Lovelace architecture. This means there are 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. While the RTX 4070 Ti features dual units, the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 come with only one of them. 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.


All GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards use the 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, an adapter cable is included in the box.