Thick Thighs Save Lives
NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
While it's obviously useful to base our reviews on the numbers (Mason), I also think we should look at what this class of GPU is doing more holistically. The bottom line is that developers are targeting PlayStation 5 as the foundational basis of the new games they are creating and when you stack up what the 70-class GPUs from Nvidia are delivering, it's highly compelling.
To put some numbers to this, we decided to benchmark the RTX 4070 Super against the PS5 - something's that not altogether easy to do in a world of frame-rate caps and dynamic resolution scaling. In Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion, we found a spot in the Dogtown market where PS5 couldn't sustain 30fps in its RT mode. In matched settings, 4070 Super offered a 2.21x performance multiplier, rising to 2.3x when FSR2 quality mode was swapped out for its DLSS equivalent. That rose to 3.2x in frame-rate terms when DLSS 3 frame generation kicked in.
Alan Wake 2's quality mode? A 2.17x performance increase in matched settings on the RTX 4070 Super, rising to 2.31x when FSR2 balanced upscaling is again swapped out with the DLSS equivalent. And yes, it's another DLSS 3 game, meaning a 3.1x frame-rate increase over the PS5. In effect, the 4070 Super offers over twice the performance of the PS5 in these games, while DLSS increases both quality and performance.
Results will vary according to the game and the quality of the port, mind you. A Plague Tale: Requiem delivered a 1.96x like-for-like increase, very similar with DLSS quality mode. Frame-gen is available there too, and our test scene offered up a 2.5x increase in frame-rate over the console - so still a big improvement to performance even if you don't consider frame-gen a performance increase.
Naughty Dog/Iron Galaxy's lacklustre port of The Last of Us Part 1 is underwhelming, however, with a mere 36 percent increase (!) in performance over the PS5 operating in fidelity mode. DLSS is the crutch required to offer a game-changing boost to frame-rate - 4K quality mode delivering a 96 percent boost to console performance. Sometimes, not all of the console-level optimisations to make the most of the GPU make their way over to PC - async compute utilisation (or lack of it) apparently causing the problems on this problematic port.
I've discussed console comparisons and yes, optimised settings based on PS5 go a long way from turning what's dubbed a 1440p card into a proper 4K contender. After all, what we're effectively seeing in these comparisons is that 30/40fps quality modes on PlayStation 5 translate into excellent 60fps experiences... or higher. However, we're still talking about circa RTX 3090 level capabilities here, meaning that the RTX 4070 Super will happily run Cyberpunk 2077 in RT Overdrive mode or Alan Wake 2 with path-tracing. This card is still very well-placed in offering up enough raw horsepower to give you access to the absolute cutting-edge - though at that point, optimised settings become even more important.
Page 7 | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review: more frames for less money
Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super gets the full Digital Foundry review treatment, looking at performance, power efficiency, RT, upscaling and more.
www.eurogamer.net