A mere week after unveiling the GeForce RTX 4070 Super (and its siblings, the RTX 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super) at CES 2024, Nvidia’s $599 graphics card is already primed to launch.

Review embargoes lifted for Nvidia’s new 1440p champion this morning forward of a full launch tomorrow morning. I’ve received the Founders Edition model of the cardboard in hand however a extreme case of the notorious post-CES plague prevented me from evaluating it absolutely. Fortunately, a number of different unbiased reviewers have finished testing, and Nvidia’s newest GPU seems to be like a celebrity.

Here are 5 issues you should know in regards to the $599 GeForce RTX 4070 Super.

Super-sized efficiency enhance

Nvidia’s greatest change to the GeForce RTX 4070 Super is the infusion of a whopping 20 % extra CUDA, ray tracing, and tensor cores on this new mannequin, all on the similar value as its vanilla namesake. Unsurprisingly, this ends in an enormous enhance in gaming efficiency:

“Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite, at 1440p, we find the RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition 15% faster than the RTX 4070 non-Super, which is a pretty substantial improvement for a refresh,” declares TechPowerUp, a margin substantiated by different reviewers. “This means that the card is able to match last generation’s RTX 3090 flagship, and the gap to RTX 4070 Ti shrinks to just 8%… While AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT was a bit faster than RTX 4070 in pure raster scenarios, this has changed with the RTX 4070 Super, which is now 7% faster.”

That’s an enormous leap – and one that can little doubt assist the RTX 4070 Super usurp the Radeon RX 7800 XT on our listing of the best graphics cards. AMD’s rival typically outpunched the RTX 4070 non-Super regardless of costing $100 much less however that’s not the case with the Super.

Killer Nvidia performance-boosting AI applied sciences like DLSS, Frame Generation, and RTX Video Super Resolution can all push body charges even additional in video games that help them. This is what the RTX 4070 ought to have been at launch.

Undisputed ray tracing champ

All these additional cores push the RTX 4070 Super’s ray tracing prowess to new heights, too.

“Ray tracing performance also scales similarly, at least when comparing the 4070 Super to the OG 4070 and the 4070 Ti,” KitGuru writes. “It is significantly faster than the RX 7800 XT over the eight games we tested with ray tracing enabled, to the tune of 47% on average, while it’s in the same class as the RX 7900 XTX.”

That’s a $1,000 AMD Radeon graphics card, for these conserving rating. Ray tracing is a energy for Nvidia and the RTX 4070 Super pushes the pedal to the metallic.

More energy

Adam Patrick Murray / IDG

More energy requires, nicely, extra energy. The GeForce RTX 4070 Super has its “total graphics power” score bumped to 220 watts, 20W greater than the vanilla 4070. It additionally transitions purely to Nvidia’s 16-pin energy connector. It looks like a worthwhile sacrifice for the efficiency on provide.

Still made for 1440p

Even with all the additional grunt, this in all probability isn’t a graphics card to choose up for long-term 4K gaming. While the step-up RTX 4070 Ti Super strikes to a beefier reminiscence configuration with extra capability and a wider bus width, the RTX 4070 Super sticks to the identical AD104 GPU because the vanilla model. That means it comes with 12GB of reminiscence over a 192-bit bus – nice specs for 1440p gaming, however lighter than you’d need for 4K with video games changing into extra memory-intensive nearly by the day.

The OG 4070 is sticking round

Finally, whereas the 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super’s releases sign the deaths of the graphics playing cards they’re changing, Nvidia is conserving the unique RTX 4070 round, however at a decrease $549 value level. We’d anticipate retailers and board companions to push that down nearer to $500 on the streets, the place the vanilla RTX 4070 and its DLSS 3 benefit might be way more aggressive with AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT.