Introduction

NVIDIA today debuted the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, its third release from the RTX 50-series Blackwell generation. The RTX 5070 Ti is positioned in a gray area between the performance and enthusiast segments, given its starting price of $750. Much like the RTX 4070 Ti from the previous generation, NVIDIA does not explicitly recommend it for 4K Ultra HD gaming, instead slotting it in the rather broad 1440p class, but there should be plenty of performance on tap for 4K Ultra HD gameplay at its native resolution if you know your way around game settings, or make the NVIDIA App find the best settings for you. Then there’s always DLSS, and Blackwell introduces DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and image quality improvements in all performance presets thanks to a new Transformer-based AI model at the helm of upscaling. There is no first-party RTX 5070 Ti Founders Edition card from NVIDIA, the company instead sent us the MSI RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X, a card priced at the $750 MSRP.

The new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has a lot in common with the enthusiast-segment RTX 5080 which we reviewed late last month. For starters, the two cards share the same GB203 silicon, and while the RTX 5080 maxes this out, the RTX 5070 Ti is cut down from it. The GB203 silicon physically has 84 streaming multiprocessors (SM), all of which are enabled on the RTX 5080. The RTX 5070 Ti enables 70 out of these 84. Besides the newer architecture, this is a fairly big increase from the previous generation RTX 4070 Ti, which has 60 SM; even its refresh RTX 4070 Ti Super comes with 66 SM, a wee bit shy of the RTX 5070 Ti. With 70 SM on tap, the RTX 5070 Ti enjoys 8,960 CUDA cores, 280 Tensor cores, 70 RT cores, and 280 TMUs. The card gets 96 out of the 112 ROPs present on the GB203, and 48 MB out of the 64 MB present. The RTX 5070 Ti maxes out the 256-bit GDDR7 memory bus of the GB203, just like the RTX 5080, and gets 16 GB of memory—an increase from the 12 GB and 192-bit GDDR6X of the RTX 4070 Ti. The swanky new GDDR7 memory runs at 28 Gbps compared to 30 Gbps on the RTX 5080. The memory bandwidth is hence 896 GB/s compared to the 960 GB/s of its bigger sibling. The finally two differentiators between the two are GPU frequencies and total graphics power, with the RTX 5070 Ti boosting up to 2432 MHz, with a 300 W TGP, compared to the 360 W of the RTX 5080.

Much like the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 launched before it, the RTX 5070 Ti comes with several new technologies thanks to the new Blackwell graphics architecture it’s based on. To begin with, it implements Neural Rendering, a feature that brings the awesome power of generative AI directly to the graphics rendering pipeline. The GPU now has the ability to run a generative AI model in tandem with rendering graphics thanks to a new hardware scheduler on these chips, called the AI Management Processor (AMP). Neural Rendering allows certain objects created by the generative AI to be combined with conventional raster 3D graphics, just like RTX brings real time ray traced objects to it. This should vastly improve realism in games. The new Blackwell generation SM comes with concurrent FP32 and INT32 math capability on all CUDA cores, the previous generation Ada only had INT32 capability on half the cores in an SM. The shader execution reordering mechanism is now aware of neural shaders. The 5th generation Tensor cores come with FP4 data format capability, which should max out throughput by trading in precision. The new RT cores come with even more hardware-based components, and are ready for Mega Geometry, which vastly improves the poly count of ray traced objects using hierarchical techniques resembling Mega Textures.

Then there are DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation. NVIDIA updated the AI model at the heart of the DLSS upscaler to one based on more advanced Transformers, instead of an older convoluted neural network (CNN). The new Transformer based model is more accurate, and hence there are image quality uplifts to be expected in all performance presets. NVIDIA introduced a new hardware component with Blackwell called Display Flip Metering, with which Blackwell implements Multi Frame Generation, or the ability for the GPU to generate up to three consecutive frames from a single conventionally rendered one, effectively quadrupling frame rates. While the Transformer models for upscaling and ray-reconstruction are available even for older RTX 40-series and RTX 30-series GPUs, Multi Frame Generation is exclusive to the RTX 50-series.

The MSI RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X is a simple yet elegant looking piece of hardware, which meets NVIDIA’s SFF-Ready spec thanks to its relatively compact dimensions of 30 cm length, 4.9 cm thickness, and 12 cm height. The card features a silver+black two-tone cooler shroud with a design resembling that of the RTX 20-series Founders Edition cards. Three axial flow fans ventilate an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, which pulls heat from the GPU over a sold metal baseplate (instead of a vapor chamber). The card comes with a minor factory overclock of 2482 MHz, compared to 2452 MHz reference. Although this card is launching at $750, you can expect is post-launch real world pricing to be much higher. I hope NVIDIA is paying attention to the fact that Grand Theft Auto 6 is launching on consoles first, the PC release will likely come year(s) later, and so overpriced PC hardware isn’t going to help the platform.