Despite the overwhelming power of the RTX 5090, it was perhaps the RTX 5070 that saw the most headlines in the wake of Nvidia’s 50-series announcements. RTX 4090 levels of performance from a $550 card is a heck of a promise, but what’s arrived isn’t anywhere near as exciting. Instead, we’re looking at something akin to the RTX 4070 Super, a good card by all accounts at its $600 price point, but equipped with DLSS 4 and discounted to $550. That’s a reasonable upgrade, but not one that’ll grab the headlines.
After all, as we’ve spent more time with DLSS 4, it’s become clear that lower-end tiers see less utility from the multi frame generation feature, requiring more setup to keep latency at acceptable levels. It’s still a great option to have – and we get into how it operates in more detail on page eight – but it’s not quite the set-and-forget ticket for maxing out your monitor’s refresh rate as it is on the 5080 and 5090.
There are other by-now familiar limitations too, with the decent gen-on-gen gains of the RTX 5090 getting less and less impressive the lower we go on the stack. Fundamentally, this is a relatively restrained upgrade, built on the same process as 40-series, with the gen-on-gen upgrades coming just from faster GDDR7 memory and higher power budgets. So too is it with the 5070, with performance regressions in a handful of games versus 4070 Super, along with six to seven percent performance wins in most other titles.
Nvidia faces other problems too – beyond the reports of black screen issues, missing ROPs and the like. AMD has announced two GPUs: 9070 and 9070 XT. Extrapolating out from AMD’s benchmarks, the 9070 has more memory and more performance for the same $550 sticker price – yes, even ray tracing. Meanwhile, pay a $50 premium and you get an AMD GPU that is basically as potent as a 5070 Ti.