Introduction

ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Dual forms the company’s best efforts to sell a custom-design RTX 4070 SUPER at the NVIDIA baseline price. Over the past few GPU launches, NVIDIA has been encouraging its partners to focus on bringing value to their custom graphics cards at the MSRP, including giving them a day earlier media reviews, which is a great move, as now partners are incentivized to make their lower-priced cards better. You wouldn’t want your cheapest custom design card to look ugly and leave a bad first impression on buyers before reviews of your swanky OC cards come out a day later. ASUS understands this, and has designed a beautiful baseline custom card with its latest crop of “Dual” graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is part of a three-SKU mid-lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series, just like NVIDIA did with the RTX 20-series SUPER. They don’t introduce any new features, but are meant to offer improved performance at given price-points, when compared to the cards they displace in the product stack.

NVIDIA had left a rather large performance gap between the GeForce RTX 4070 and the RTX 4070 Ti (which it had originally branded as the “RTX 4080 12 GB”); which over time was exploited by AMD to introduce its Radeon RX 7800 XT. The new RTX 4070 SUPER is meant to be an “almost RTX 4070 Ti” product at the $600 original price of the RTX 4070; while the RTX 4070 Ti is being retired from the product stack, and replaced by the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER at its original $800 price, which goes on sale next week—so big changes in the $500-800 segment are afoot. The new RTX 4070 SUPER is being recommended by NVIDIA for maxed out AAA gaming at 1440p, including with ray tracing, although we found even the original RTX 4070 to be plenty capable of 4K UHD gameplay—just be a little smart with your game settings, or take advantage of DLSS or DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

Since the RTX 4070 only uses 46 out of the available 60 SM (streaming multiprocessors) available on the AD104, NVIDIA has a vast gap in which to carve out the new GPU. The RTX 4070 SUPER gets 56 SM, which is very close to the 60 of the RTX 4070 Ti. There are proportionate increases in other components, including 224 Tensor cores, 56 RT cores, and 224 TMUs, all amounting to a 21% increase in SIMD resources over the RTX 4070. NVIDIA also maxed out the ROP count on the AD104, enabling all 80 of them, compared to the 64 on the RTX 4070. The on-die L2 cache size has been increased to 48 MB from 36 MB on the RTX 4070, and is now on par with the RTX 4070 Ti. The rest of the memory sub-system is unchanged, and you get 12 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 192-bit memory bus, yielding 504 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The generationally larger on-die cache helps NVIDIA narrow the memory bus, although the memory size has increased compared to even the previous-generation RTX 3070 Ti, with its 8 GB.

As we mentioned earlier, the RTX 40 SUPER series are based on the existing 5 nm Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, and as such there are no feature changes except performance uplifts at given price points. Ada introduces a new generation CUDA core with increased IPC and support for new math formats, as well as shader execution reordering, a feature that speeds up ray tracing. The new 3rd generation RT core, besides increased ray intersection performance, debuts displaced micro-meshes, which enables greater complexity in ray traced objects. The new optical flow accelerator component enables the GPU to draw alternate frames entirely using AI, cutting out the main raster machinery, which is how DLSS 3 Frame Generation works.

The ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Dual features a slick, two-tone product design, with alternating matte black and tinted see-through polycarbonate crowning the heatsink underneath. The card uses a pair of large Axial Tech fans, which come with webbed impellers to guide all their airflow axially. Since NVIDIA has increased the TGP of the RTX 4070 SUPER by 10% over the RTX 4070, the solo 8-pin PCIe power connector makes way for the modern 12VHPWR, an NVIDIA designed adapter is included in the box. The ASUS RTX 4070 Super Dual is priced exactly at the $600 baseline. There is a variant with a slight factory overclock, called the Dual OC, which should be priced slightly higher.