Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review: A stagnant ‘upgrade’ but an okay GPU

Price When Reviewed

649 Euro

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When the RTX 5080 launched in January, it became clear that the fate of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series lies in DLSS 4’s hands. The graphics card offered a bare minimum performance upgrade over its predecessor, instead relying on the magic of DLSS 4’s new Multiple Frame Generation feature to drive frame rates forward in supported games.

The $550 GeForce RTX 5070 takes that to the extreme.

Nvidia’s new graphics card delivers virtually identical performance to the RTX 4070 Super, a year after the 4070 Super launched. It has the same memory configuration as its predecessor. It costs just $50 less. The RTX 5070 is essentially a 4070 Super with DLSS 4. This isn’t an upgrade; it’s stagnation.

We’ve spent the past week benchmarking Nvidia’s cute lil’ RTX 5070 Founders Edition in a variety of games and workloads. Here’s what you need to know before buying Nvidia’s latest GPU.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 performance benchmarks

Again, the RTX 5070 delivers nearly identical performance to the 4070 Super. In some games the RTX 5070 is a little faster; in some games, surprisingly, the 4070 Super is a little faster; and in others they’re basically in a dead heat.

That’s profoundly disappointing – but just because the RTX 5070 is an atrocious generational upgrade doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad graphics card.

It sails past the 100 frames-per-second mark in many of our gaming benchmarks, even with all graphics settings cranked to the maximum at 1440p resolution. In our most strenuous tests – Black Myth Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode with path-traced lighting – the RTX 5070 manages to hit the hallowed 60fps mark demanded by PC gaming enthusiasts. The 12GB of GDDR7 memory feels skimpy for a $500+ graphics card in 2025 and may limit performance in future memory-heavy games, however.

If you already have a gaming PC you can simply drop the RTX 5070 into, it’ll deliver a vastly better gaming experience than the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro for $150 less. That value proposition goes away if you need to build the rest of the rig around it, however.

Built for 1440p gaming, with just 12GB of VRAM

You could definitely play a lot of games at 4K resolution with the RTX 5070, especially in games that support DLSS. But don’t buy the RTX 5070 for 4K gaming. This card is built for 1440p gaming.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

Nvidia gave the RTX 5070 the same memory configuration as the RTX 4070 Super; 12GB of memory over a 192-bit bus, though the memory has been upgraded from GDDR6X to GDDR7. Here’s a quote from our RTX 4070 non-Super review in 2023 that’s just as applicable to the RTX 5070:

“Nvidia’s decision to equip the RTX 4070 with a 192-bit bus and 12GB of memory prevent us from being able to recommend it for long-term 4K gaming, especially with memory requirements only rising in modern games.”

Nvidia failed to respond to this criticism and it’s only more urgent two years later. Slapping just 12GB of RAM on a $550 graphics card feels insulting – especially since Intel’s $250 Arc B580 offers the same capacity for less than half the price. AMD’s challenger, the Radeon RX 9070, comes with 16GB of RAM.

Nvidia needs to do better here…but the uninspiring memory configuration should hold up fine for 1440p gaming in most scenarios.

DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Gen tech will knock your socks off

I’ve said it in every RTX 50-series review thus far, and I’ll say it again for the RTX 5070: DLSS 4’s new Multi Frame Generation feature – which inserts up to three AI-generated frames between every two “traditional” frames, to send frame rates and visual smoothness absolutely soaring – is truly transformative. It can make even a clunky game like Star Wars Outlaws feel as sublime as the legendary Doom 2016, though the overall experience is a bit hard to measure with normal tools.

The RTX 5070 is the ideal “vehicle” for MFG in a lot of ways. Since MFG’s inserted AI frames don’t respond to your inputs, it can add latency compared to running a game at the same frame rate without MFG. If you can get a game’s baseline performance to 60fps or so before flipping on MFG, it generally feels fine (and looks stunning) in single-player games.

As shown above, the RTX 5070 hits 60fps at 1440p even in our most strenuous benchmarks. That means you can crank the eye candy to the max, flip on MFG, and enjoy a mind-bendingly smooth experience in the 75+ games that support DLSS 4, no additional headaches or hassles required.

PCWorld video guru Adam Patrick Murray spent days playing more than 20 DLSS 4 games to get a feel for the new technology. You can see his thoughts in the video above; he used an RTX 5070 Ti for testing, but the same takeaways apply to the 5070 as well.

There’s a reason Nvidia is betting the RTX 50-series’ fate on DLSS 4. It’s that damned good.

Related: Nvidia’s DLSS 4 is so much more than just ‘fake frames’

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