The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 is finally official, and Nvidia is making one spectacularly bold claim about its performance. The company has declared this new $549, mid-range gaming GPU will be faster than the RTX 4090, though as you might imagine there’s a catch.
With Nvidia taking to the stage at CES to announce its full suite of RTX 5000 gaming GPUs, including the flagship RTX 5090, it revealed a host of interesting new products and technologies. However, it was the company’s bold claim about the RTX 5070 that was perhaps most striking.
For context, the RTX 5070 specs are that it houses 6,144 CUDA cores, has a 192-bit memory interface, and is equipped with 12GB of VRAM. That compares very closely to its current-gen equivalent, the RTX 4070, which houses 5,888 CUDA cores, has a 192-bit memory interface, and 12GB of VRAM. Meanwhile the RTX 4090 has 16,384 CUDA cores, a 384-bit memory interface, and 24GB of VRAM. Even with new architectural tweaks and the RTX 5070 using faster GDDR7 VRAM, that’s one hell of a specs gap to make up.
Sure enough, Nvidia’s claim that the RTX 5070 offers “4090 performance at $549” comes with the major caveat that such a feat is “impossible without artificial intelligence.” Specifically, it’s the new card’s access to 40TFLOPs of AI processing power and Nvidia’s new neural rendering and DLSS 4 technologies that allow this card to achieve such performance.
DLSS 4, which the company announced alongside its new GPUs, is seemingly the major powerhouse for this performance leap. Like previous versions of DLSS, it uses AI to generate new pixels to help upscale lower resolution frames to higher resolution frames and then can also generate entirely new frames.
Where DLSS goes beyond the frame generation of DLSS 3, though, is that it can now generate up to three new frames rather than just one. That means that you can effectively get four times the perceived frame rate of rendering without frame generation or twice the frame rate compared to previous versions of frame generation.
What isn’t clear from Nvidia’s presentation is whether its claims about the RTX 5070’s performance versus the RTX 4090 are with the RTX 4090 also using the single frame generation of DLSS 3 or with the card only doing conventional rendering without DLSS.
If it’s the latter, then the company’s claim is wildly misleading. However, if it’s the former, that still implies that the RTX 5070 provides a significant boost in raw performance compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4070.
What seems certain, though, is that AMD is going to have quite the fight on its hands as that company has pitched its new flagship card, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, directly against the RTX 5070. Then again, AMD has its own new version of its upscaling and frame generation technology, FSR 4, arriving with that card, so it’s sure to be an interesting contest to see who’s GPU can claim to be powering the best graphics card options at this highly competitive price range.