Introduction

The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Vulcan W OC is one of the company’s top custom-design renditions of the second GPU in the SUPER mid-lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series. The RTX 4070 SUPER launched last week, the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER went on sale on Wednesday; and will be joined by the RTX 4080 SUPER next week. Colorful has a reputation for engineering and artistic boldness with its custom design graphics cards, and we’ve always come to expect a little more than the other brands from Colorful. The iGame Vulcan W OC from Colorful is no exception, it combines the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER with a heavy cooling solution, and the kind of innovations we can expect only Colorful to pull off; such as the iGame Smart LCD, a rectangular display on the card itself, which shows real-time monitoring stats, but is programmable. This display can be swapped out for an included RGB LED element.

The NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti SUPER replaces the RTX 4070 Ti from the product stack at its $800 MSRP. You should still be able to find RTX 4070 Ti cards at slightly lower prices, but the card has stopped production. The new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER comes with a much improved specs sheet over the original RTX 4070 Ti, with the biggest change being memory. You now get 16 GB of memory across a 256-bit memory bus; compared to 12 GB of it across a 192-bit memory bus for the original. This change results in the GPCs getting fed with a 33% increase in memory bandwidth. Besides this, the card also gets a handy 10% increase in CUDA cores, and more ROPs.

NVIDIA had maxed out the AD104 silicon to create the RTX 4070 Ti, which means that it had to tap into the larger AD103 silicon for more shaders. This is a much larger chip, powering the likes of the RTX 4080 and mobile RTX 4090 series. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is carved out of this chip by enabling 66 out of 80 SM, worth 8,448 CUDA cores, 264 Tensor cores, 66 RT cores, and 264 TMUs. The ROP count is set at 96, out of the 112 present on the silicon. This is still 20% higher than the 80 ROPs that the RTX 4070 Ti has. The on-die L2 cache is left untouched at 48 MB, it doesn’t see an increase to the 64 MB available on the silicon.

NVIDIA Ada Lovelace graphics architecture is designed for the 5 nm EUV foundry process to increase transistor counts, performance, and efficiency. The new generation CUDA cores run at higher frequencies taking advantage of the node, with increased IPC, and support for shader execution reordering, a feature that should improve performance of ray tracing workloads. The 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 to draw entire alternate frames using AI, and is required for DLSS 3 Frame Generation to work.

Besides the iGame LCD Display, the Colorful iGame RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Vulcan W OC comes in an all-white color scheme (hence the W in the name). The white paint job not only covers the cooler shroud and backplate, or even the three fan impellers; but also the individual fins on the heatsink. Most graphics card designers leave the fins at their default silver-chrome in hopes that it’s a neutral color that blends in with white, but not Colorful. The PCB is out of sight, and so it can be left black. The card also comes with a neat factory overclock, running the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER at 2680 MHz, compared to 2610 MHz reference. Out of the box, the card comes with the “normal” mode BIOS that runs at at 2610 MHz, you have to press a physical button at the rear I/O, which engages the “turbo” BIOS and the factory overclock. Usually graphics card vendors have their overclocked BIOS as their default ones, and the secondary BIOS as “quiet” ones. For this reason, we will be testing the card with its default BIOS. Colorful hasn’t mentioned a price, but we are estimating this to be $900.