NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Benchmark Results Suggest Up to 20% Performance Increase Over RTX 4070

Recent leaks have revealed the first performance benchmarks of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5070, which shows significant improvements compared to the previous model. The RTX 5070 boasts a performance increase of nearly 15% over the RTX 4070, achieving as much as a 20% boost in certain tests, particularly in Vulkan benchmarks where it outperforms even the 4070 Ti.

The RTX 5070 is part of NVIDIA’s new RTX 50 series, known as “Blackwell.” It is expected to retail around $500, with an official price set at $549. This is notably $50 less than the initial price of the RTX 4070, which was also adjusted to $549 after the release of the 4070 SUPER. NVIDIA has confirmed that the RTX 5070 will be available in stores starting on March 5th. This marks a slight delay from the initial launch expectations, but there is optimism that this model won’t face the same supply challenges as the higher-end variants. This may be attributed to the chip design, the Blackwell GB205, which is likely to see more robust production, particularly for laptops.

It’s important to note that there are still some unresolved issues with the RTX 50 series. NVIDIA confirmed that some missing ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) are only affecting the RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti models. However, the RTX 5080 also faces similar concerns. The impact on the RTX 5070 will likely become clear at launch.

Performance numbers for the RTX 5070 were gathered using Geekbench, a benchmarking tool. While these figures offer a glimpse into the GPU’s potential, they do not directly translate to real-world gaming performance. Benchmarking results showed that the RTX 5070 scored 187,414 points in the OpenCL test and an impressive 188,712 points in the Vulkan test. In comparison, the RTX 4070 scored only 167,924 in OpenCL and 156,601 in Vulkan, showcasing the notable improvements in the new model.

Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti, performance in Vulkan is similar, but the OpenCL results reveal a wider gap, favoring the 4070 Ti. The 4070 Ti comes with the same VRAM capacity, but when matched against the more powerful 4070 Ti SUPER, the RTX 5070 falls short, especially since the SUPER version has more VRAM (16 GB compared to the 5070’s 12 GB).

Overall, gaming performance for the RTX 5070 is expected to fall between what the 4070 Ti and the 4070 Ti SUPER can achieve. This level of performance is considerably lower than what NVIDIA suggested during product showcases for the RTX 4090, which can only match those claims with the help of DLSS 4 technology, not available on the RTX 40 series.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 will also face stiff competition from AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series, which utilizes RDNA 4 architecture and is anticipated to deliver strong performance at competitive prices. To stay attractive in the market, NVIDIA may need to rely on its software advances and possibly include game bundles to entice gamers.