With Nvidia's RTX 4070 (opens in new tab) about to be released any day now, leaked information is pouring in. Already Nvidia has listed the unannounced graphics card in their marketing materials (opens in new tab). And now, what appears to be the full version of the leaked benchmarks, showing the RTX 4070's overall performance comparable to the older RTX 3080, has appeared.

The benchmark slides (opens in new tab), posted by Videocardz, are formatted in the usual Nvidia style and appear to be part of marketing materials or a review guide for journalists. In any case, it shows that the upcoming GPU is comparable to the old RTX 3080 (opens in new tab) at 1440p with DLSS and ray tracing enabled.

In other words, the same performance for $100 less MSRP. Oh yeah, the slides also confirm the rumored $599 pricing of the RTX 4070; compared to the 3070 Ti (open in new tab), the slides show a 20% improvement, and compared to the RTX 3070 (open in new tab), a 30% improvement.

Also, the "leaked" performance numbers indicate a greater improvement with the frame generation feature turned on.

The second slide compares the new RTX 4070 with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 2070 Super on a game-by-game basis. Most results show significant gains due to the frame generation benefit, but more limited games are included, showing smaller gains in games that do not support this feature.

One might wonder, but at least in this leak there are no pure raster results without DLSS and ray tracing enabled. Given that all RTX 40 series GPUs have enhanced ray tracing performance versus older RTX 30 boards, one might expect the performance boost for regular old raster games to be a bit smaller. In other words, if these benchmarks are real, the generational improvement in pure raster performance over the RTX 3070 would be less than 30%.

Overall, these numbers look plausible, are likely genuine, and are consistent with another leaked information (open in new tab) from about a week ago. If so, the RTX 4070 would provide only a small performance gain per dollar, unless one considers the frame rate with frame generation enabled. However, while this is a very useful feature, it is not possible.

Frame generation is not useful in situations where it is most needed. This is because it is added when a playable frame rate simply cannot be achieved, i.e., when latency is not needed. What frame generation is good for is smoothing out gameplay where the frame rate is playable but not as smooth as one would like.

In any case, we'll soon see how the RTX 4070 stacks up for everyone to see. Stay tuned.