Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review: A stagnant ‘upgrade’ but an okay GPU

Price When Reviewed

$549

Best Prices Today: GeForce RTX 5070

When the RTX 5080 launched in January, it became clear that the fate of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series lies in DLSS 4’s hands. The graphics card offered a bare minimum performance upgrade over its predecessor, instead relying on the magic of DLSS 4’s new Multiple Frame Generation feature to drive frame rates forward in supported games.

The $550 GeForce RTX 5070 takes that to the extreme.

Nvidia’s new graphics card delivers virtually identical performance to the RTX 4070 Super, a year after the 4070 Super launched. It has the same memory configuration as its predecessor. It costs just $50 less. The RTX 5070 is essentially a 4070 Super with DLSS 4. This isn’t an upgrade; it’s stagnation.

We’ve spent the past week benchmarking Nvidia’s cute lil’ RTX 5070 Founders Edition in a variety of games and workloads. Here’s what you need to know before buying Nvidia’s latest GPU.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 performance benchmarks

Again, the RTX 5070 delivers nearly identical performance to the 4070 Super. In some games the RTX 5070 is a little faster; in some games, surprisingly, the 4070 Super is a little faster; and in others they’re basically in a dead heat.

That’s profoundly disappointing – but just because the RTX 5070 is an atrocious generational upgrade doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad graphics card.

It sails past the 100 frames-per-second mark in many of our gaming benchmarks, even with all graphics settings cranked to the maximum at 1440p resolution. In our most strenuous tests – Black Myth Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode with path-traced lighting – the RTX 5070 manages to hit the hallowed 60fps mark demanded by PC gaming enthusiasts. The 12GB of GDDR7 memory feels skimpy for a $500+ graphics card in 2025 and may limit performance in future memory-heavy games, however.

If you already have a gaming PC you can simply drop the RTX 5070 into, it’ll deliver a vastly better gaming experience than the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro for $150 less. That value proposition goes away if you need to build the rest of the rig around it, however.

Built for 1440p gaming, with just 12GB of VRAM

You could definitely play a lot of games at 4K resolution with the RTX 5070, especially in games that support DLSS. But don’t buy the RTX 5070 for 4K gaming. This card is built for 1440p gaming.

Nvidia gave the RTX 5070 the same memory configuration as the RTX 4070 Super; 12GB of memory over a 192-bit bus, though the memory has been upgraded from GDDR6X to GDDR7. Here’s a quote from our RTX 4070 non-Super review in 2023 that’s just as applicable to the RTX 5070:

“Nvidia’s decision to equip the RTX 4070 with a 192-bit bus and 12GB of memory prevent us from being able to recommend it for long-term 4K gaming, especially with memory requirements only rising in modern games.”

Nvidia failed to respond to this criticism and it’s only more urgent two years later. Slapping just 12GB of RAM on a $550 graphics card feels insulting – especially since Intel’s $250 Arc B580 offers the same capacity for less than half the price. AMD’s challenger, the Radeon RX 9070, comes with 16GB of RAM.

Nvidia needs to do better here…but the uninspiring memory configuration should hold up fine for 1440p gaming in most scenarios.

DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Gen tech will knock your socks off

I’ve said it in every RTX 50-series review thus far, and I’ll say it again for the RTX 5070: DLSS 4’s new Multi Frame Generation feature – which inserts up to three AI-generated frames between every two “traditional” frames, to send frame rates and visual smoothness absolutely soaring – is truly transformative. It can make even a clunky game like Star Wars Outlaws feel as sublime as the legendary Doom 2016, though the overall experience is a bit hard to measure with normal tools.

The RTX 5070 is the ideal “vehicle” for MFG in a lot of ways. Since MFG’s inserted AI frames don’t respond to your inputs, it can add latency compared to running a game at the same frame rate without MFG. If you can get a game’s baseline performance to 60fps or so before flipping on MFG, it generally feels fine (and looks stunning) in single-player games.

As shown above, the RTX 5070 hits 60fps at 1440p even in our most strenuous benchmarks. That means you can crank the eye candy to the max, flip on MFG, and enjoy a mind-bendingly smooth experience in the 75+ games that support DLSS 4, no additional headaches or hassles required.

PCWorld video guru Adam Patrick Murray spent days playing more than 20 DLSS 4 games to get a feel for the new technology. You can see his thoughts in the video above; he used an RTX 5070 Ti for testing, but the same takeaways apply to the 5070 as well.

There’s a reason Nvidia is betting the RTX 50-series’ fate on DLSS 4. It’s that damned good.

Related: Nvidia’s DLSS 4 is so much more than just ‘fake frames’

AMD’s Radeon rival is just around the corner

AMD

Nvidia won’t like this tidbit, but there’s another crucial aspect to know about the GeForce RTX 5070’s launch: AMD’s direct competitor is launching just a day later.

The RTX 5070 launches March 5, tomorrow. AMD’s $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT and $549 Radeon RX 9070 launch March 6.

Independent reviews of the Radeon 9070 series have yet to be published, but AMD outfitted both GPUs with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and says it’s targeting “4K gaming at a 1440p price.” The company also promises large improvements in ray tracing performance, and finally invested in beefed-up AI accelerators to power FSR 4, which will be available in 30 games at launch.

Given the RTX 5070’s negligible performance upgrade over the 4070 Super, smart buyers may want to see what AMD is brewing before investing $549 on Nvidia’s card. AMD partners have been shipping Radeon RX 9070 stock to retailers for months now so you may actually be able to grab one before the GPUs sell out, too.

Should you buy the GeForce RTX 5070?

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

If you’re coming from an RTX 3070 – or anything older or weaker – the RTX 5070 will be a tangible upgrade. You’ll feel the leap forward in performance, and the extra memory capacity. Even though the RTX 5070’s mere 12GB of memory disappoints in a $500+ graphics card in 2025, the older RTX 3070 only had 8GB, and that can feel awfully tight at 1440p resolution. The RTX 3070 already needs to make visual compromises to meet the memory demands of many modern games.

The RTX 5070 doesn’t, though the 12GB capacity is nowhere near as future-proof as the 16GB found on virtually all other graphics cards in this price range. The limited capacity means you won’t want this GPU for 4K gaming.

While the RTX 5070 is one of the worst generational GPU “upgrades” in memory, it’s still a very good 1440p graphics card. Performance soars over 100fps in many games even with graphics settings cranked to the max, and crosses 60fps even in our most strenuous tests with ray tracing enabled. That gives the RTX 5070 enough firepower to flip on DLSS 4’s jaw-dropping Multi-Frame Gen tech, which unlocks new levels of visual smoothness that must be seen to believed. It’s available in 75+ games.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

If you don’t plan on utilizing DLSS 4, well, you’re truly missing out. It’s great. But the RTX 5070 loses a lot of its luster when it’s not churning out AI frames. In non-DLSS games, the RTX 4070 Super has offered identical performance levels for over a year now.

Bottom line? Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 is a stagnant “upgrade” from a hardware point of view, and it’s skimpy with RAM considering the price. But yes, DLSS 4 software gives the RTX 5070 superpowers otherwise unachievable – at least in the games that actively support it. I’m deeply disappointed that Nvidia didn’t move the needle in performance or memory capacity, and barely nudged the price down in return. But this is nonetheless a good 1440p graphics card.

Given the stagnation, and given that AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 launches just a day after the RTX 5070 but with 16GB of memory, I’d strongly suggest waiting for reviews of that graphics card before making a purchase. Weigh all your options before plunking down your $550.