Jarred Walton considers what’s so super about mid-cycle updates.
Like clockwork, the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super has arrived right on schedule. The first of the mid-cycle 40-series Super refresh, the newcomer provides higher specs and higher performance than the existing non-Super RTX 4070, for the same £579 – pushing the 4070 RRP down to £529. It’s exactly what we expected from Nvidia, building on the successful Ada Lovelace architecture.
Two more Super models will arrive: the 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super. But for most people, the 4070 Super will be the most enticing of the offerings.
If you were already on the fence and looking at the RTX 4070, the 4070 Super delivers an easy upgrade option. At the same time, it comes with the same potential issue as those cards: the 192-bit memory interface and 12GB of VRAM. In our testing, 12GB of graphics memory with the larger L2 caches of the Ada architecture works fine, and you get equivalent performance to the previous generation RTX 3090 for less than half the cost – and half the memory. It’s still 33% less VRAM than AMD’s competing RX 7800 XT.
Making new connections
As for the specification, it’s the same 2,475MHz boost clock as the 4070 but with 22% more cores and a 10% higher power consumption. It also has to use the new(ish) 16-pin power connector, so you need an ATX 3.0 PSU, or otherwise use an adaptor, which seems unnecessary on a 220W GPU.
For Stable Diffusion benchmarks, the 4070 Super lands right between the 4070 and 4070 Ti, offering 12% more performance than the 4070 and 11% less performance than the 4070 Ti – this is at 512x512. AMD’s GPUs can in theory run larger LLMs as they have more VRAM, but Nvidia offers far more AI compute performance than AMD. The 4070 Super is 40% and 30% faster at 512x512 and 768x768 when compared with AMD’s current top GPU, the 7900 XTX.
For GPU-accelerated 3D rendering, Blender supports all main GPUs and can now leverage the ray-tracing hardware, directly boosting Nvidia’s scores. So, it’s no surprise that Nvidia’s GPUs come out far ahead of AMD’s offerings, with the 4070 Super running 84% faster than AMD’s 7900 XTX.
For more general productivity, we use SPECview 2020 v3 with the geometric mean of all eight tests. In this, the 4070 Super only manages to match the RX 7600, and falls far behind the 7900 XT.
