The new Nvidia RTX 4070 (open in new tab) is a smart little graphics card that brings the gaming performance of the venerable RTX 3080 (open in new tab) down to a more attractive price point. It is also cooler, quieter, and more efficient, and has the potential of DLSS 3 with frame generation capabilities to give it an additional edge.

One of the best things about the new Ada GeForce cards, however, is that Nvidia has put pressure on its partners to ensure that there will be plenty of reference priced versions of the GPU available at launch.

It has been promised that virtually anyone who wants a reference card, whether it is the Founders Edition or a third-party AIB version, should be able to purchase one. Frankly, this is a lofty goal, and given the voracious demands of PC gamers, it may be difficult to match in practice, but talking to retailers, there are far more cards in the channel than at previous RTX 40 series launches, which is hopeful.

And cards like the reference-priced PNY RTX 4070 (opens in new tab) are worth a look. [If you're paying $599 for a lightweight, dual-fan GPU, you might expect more than a nondescript plastic shroud. But the finely tuned AD104 silicon at the heart of the RTX 4070 actually requires no more accessories than that, no vast cooler, no vast number of VRMs. Nor does it need RGB LEDs to illuminate the rig.

So when I handed over the suspiciously lightweight box, I was a little worried that the courier might have taken my card, but I was happy enough with the simple design choices that PNY took with their reference card. And it does so with a metal backplate and visibly sturdy copper heatpipes.

The AD104 GPU on the RTX 4070 is the same as the one used in the RTX 4070 Ti, minus a few SMs. This means that instead of 7,680 cores on the full chip, there are 5,888 CUDA cores, and fewer RT cores and tensor cores. However, the memory configuration remains the same 12GB GDDR6X. This means that gaming performance will be about 20-25% lower than the Ti version.

However, a look at the core configurations of the RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 highlights the generational improvement of Ada vs. Ampere. Its classic GeForce GPU has 8,704 CUDA cores, 22 RT cores, and more ROPs. It also has a wider memory bus, 320 bits versus a 192-bit bus, and thus more memory bandwidth. [However, this is a combination of TSMC's 4nm process and Ada's efficiency, which means billions more transistors in the package, despite being less than half the size of the RTX 3080 Ampere GPU. It also runs almost 1 GHz faster under gaming loads. In other words, along with the GPU's 9x L2 cache, it delivers almost the same level of performance with fewer CUDA cores.

Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

Being an RTX 40 series GPU, DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation are also available. This last feature is a key differentiator and one that promises to eventually overtake the RTX 3080 in terms of gaming. This is unprecedented AI technology magic that leverages Ada's Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to create entire game frames from scratch. Well, not quite from scratch, but based on the surrounding frames. Still, since DLSS is also used, there is not as much traditional frame-by-frame rendering. [However, not all games have frame generation, as it has to be added on a game-by-game basis. Therefore, performance may be improved over previous amperage generations, rather than being completely reliable.

However, if Frame Generation works, it will give the RTX 4070 serious 4K ray-traced gaming prowess.

1440p gaming performance

4K gaming performance

System performance

As a reference card, the PNY RTX 4070 can deliver the same level of gaming performance as the Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition. It is not the same, though. Founders cards still remain the best versions of Nvidia's reference GPUs - even if they are not specifically overclocked, they look and perform great.

The Founders card actually runs about 100 MHz faster than the chips in the PNY card, which leads to a slight frame rate lead. But honestly, this difference is so small as to be almost insignificant in the grand scheme of the game.

This means less power consumption, but the simple dual-fan cooler is not as effective as the Founders' shrouds. They are also not as loud. This is a subtle little graphics card that will happily chew up your game without demanding undue attention.

There is one important difference. That is the 8-pin PCIe power connector instead of the 16-pin that Nvidia uses on its cards due to recent ignition issues. This is the first RTX 40 series to use the older power connector, but reportedly only reference-clocked versions are given the option to switch from the 16-pin connector.

Considering that this socket powers lower-spec GPUs, it is definitely not the biggest issue for the RTX 4070 and would not be a deciding factor for me.

All things being equal, I would definitely get the Founders Edition RTX 4070. As a physical object, the RTX 4070 is better, just a little bit faster, and just a little bit cooler. But the important thing is that it will be out of stock in 30 minutes and will likely only show up once in a while.

So, if a third-party reference version performs very close to the Founders card, and therefore on the same level as the old RTX 3080 we used to love, if you can't find one for sale, this effective PNY card is the second We would not be dissatisfied with it as a second choice.