Introduction

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER OC is the company’s premium custom design rendition of the new RTX 4070 SUPER performance segment GPU launched by NVIDIA today. Within the product lineup, ASUS positions the TUF Gaming series above its DUAL OC series, and a notch below the ROG Strix series. The TUF Gaming series, over the past couple of generations, has evolved into a high-quality product design thanks to its industrial looks, and minimal cooler shroud that allows more of the heatsink to be exposed, for greater airflow. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is part of a mid lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series Ada, focusing on the higher end of the product stack. The RTX 4070 SUPER starts selling today, and is recommended by NVIDIA for 1440p gaming with maxed out settings, including ray tracing; although in the real world, the RTX 4070 series cards have been tested to be capable of 4K Ultra HD at fairly good frame rates, which you can further improve by spending some time around your game’s settings, getting GeForce Experience to find the right ones; or taking advantage of DLSS technologies, including the latest DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

The SUPER brand moniker from NVIDIA was introduced with the RTX 20-series SUPER, and denoted an uplift in performance at given price-points, without the introduction of any new technology or architecture. This is achieved by increasing the shader counts or even memory size and bandwidth. The RTX 4070 SUPER comes in at a starting price of $600, which is exactly the same as the regular RTX 4070, which is now being pushed down to $550. The RTX 4070 SUPER fills a large performance gap between the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti, which has since been exploited by AMD for its Radeon RX 7800 XT at a competitive price. The new RTX 4070 SUPER leans closer toward the RTX 4070 Ti in terms of specs. On paper, this almost an RTX 4070 Ti. While the RTX 4070 enables 46 out of 60 streaming multiprocessors (SM) present on the AD104 silicon (73% of the available SM), the RTX 4070 Ti maxes it out. The new RTX 4070 SUPER has 56 out of 60 SM, or 93%. Besides shaders, NVIDIA has also unlocked all 80 ROPs available on the silicon compared to 64 on the RTX 4070; and all 48 MB of on-die L2 cache, as opposed to to 36 MB on the RTX 4070.

With 56 streaming multiprocessors at its disposal, the RTX 4070 SUPER enjoys 7,168 CUDA cores, 224 Tensor cores, 56 RT cores, 224 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. There are no differences in memory sub-system between the RTX 4070 SUPER and the RTX 4070 Ti—both get the full 48 MB of L2 cache, and 12 GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21 Gbps, across a 192-bit memory interface, yielding 504 GB/s. This may be generationally lower when compared to something like the RTX 3060 Ti (19 Gbps GDDR6X across 256-bit), but with Ada, NVIDIA has re-architected the memory sub-system to vastly increase the on-die cache. 48 MB is vast considering the GA104 powering the RTX 3070 Ti only has 4 MB.

The Ada Lovelace graphics architecture takes advantage of the 5 nm foundry process to vastly increase transistor counts, performance, and efficiency. The new generation CUDA cores run at higher frequencies, with increased IPC, and support for shader execution reordering, a feature that should positively impact ray tracing workloads. The new 3rd generation RT core comes with increased ray intersection performance, and support for displaced micro-meshes, which allow game developers to increase the geometric complexity of ray traced objects. The new optical flow accelerator is needed top draw entire alternate frames using AI, and is needed for DLSS 3.

The ASUS TUF Gaming OC offers factory overclocked speeds of 2565 MHz, compared to NVIDIA reference 2475 MHz. A software-based “OC mode” is a one-click way of getting 2595 MHz boost clocks. The card features dual-BIOS, with its default P-Mode BIOS enabling 2565 MHz boost, while the Q-Mode BIOS dropping to reference clock speeds for a more relaxed fan tuning, lowering noise. The card is a little over three slots thick, although it’s not as long as it looks—at just 30.1 cm. ASUS is pricing the TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER OC at $690, a $90 premium over the NVIDIA MSRP, which puts it about halfway to the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti SUPER.