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The Nvidia RTX 5070 is Team Green's 1440p gaming offering. Building on the successful RTX 3070 and 4070 Super, the card brings incremental gen-on-gen improvements coupled with added Blackwell technologies like DLSS 4 multi-frame generation and faster ray tracing. Beyond under-the-hood improvements, like GDDR7 video memory, unified dual-die designs, and AI capability enhancements, the premise of the 70-class offering remains the same, targeting the $550 market with a 12 GB GPU.
This makes us ponder: who should buy the new RTX 5070? In this article, we run the GPU through its paces in a variety of benchmarks—3D graphics, LLM inference, and gaming to find out.
The Nvidia RTX 5070 was launched as an RTX 4090 killer
The RTX 5070 is based on the new Blackwell architecture, which brings strategic improvements to improve efficiency, ray tracing, and DLSS (AI) performance. The new dual-die design connected with Nvidia's High-Bandwidth Interface (HBI) means the card can simultaneously focus on multiple tasks (think 1080p ray-traced renders alongside multi-frame generation-based performance boosts) without crashing your game. Getting this technology on mid-range GPUs means better FPS at higher resolutions than previously possible.
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Coming to the specs sheet, the 5070 largely sticks to the tried-and-tested design. You get the cut-down GB205 graphics chip with modest core count bumps: ~4.5% extra CUDA, Tensor, and RT core counts. The launch price stays the same as well at $549. Here's a detailed list of the hardware you get:
A closer look at the Zotac Solid RTX 5070 OC graphics card
In our tests, we used the Zotac Solid OC variant of the GPU, which is a standard dual-slot three-fan design with slightly higher clock speeds than the base Founder's Edition variant. This also translates to a higher price: the card launched at $629.99, and we spotted variants listed at $649 online.
In terms of the design, the GPU doesn't stand out with a muted gray and gold finish. Two fans directly cool the 5070 PCB, while the third is set in a blow-through format—a staple for graphics card design. Here are some crucial operating details:
The card has some weight to it despite the compact dual-slot design. This is largely attributed to the vapor chamber-based design with dense heatsinks. The GPU supports active-stop technology, which further hints at the raw potential of the cooling design.
Overall, the design language is "solid"—it isn't flashy, but it gets the job done, as we found in our tests.
Read more: AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB gaming benchmarks
How does the RTX 5070 perform?
To test the 5070, we paired it with some of the best hardware in the market:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- Motherboard: Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Apex
- RAM: 2x G.Skill Trident Z DDR5-6000 16 GB
- Storage: 1x Gigabyte Gen 4 NVMe 1 TB, 1x Patriot P300 M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x4 128GB
- Cooler: Cooler Master Atmos 240mm liquid cooler
- Storage: Asus ROG Thor Platinum III 1200W
- GPU: Zotac RTX 5070 12 GB Solid OC
While a bit overkill, this setup ensures we get the best-case numbers from the GPU.
Synthetic benchmarks
To start things off, let's look at the card's rasterization capabilities through legacy APIs like DirectX 11. 3DMark Fire Strike provides a wonderful ground for this test.
The 5070 lies sandwiched between AMD's RX 9070 XT and the 5080, beating the former by a healthy margin. The card also leaves the flagship RX 7900 XTX in the dust, which hints at its rendering capabilities.
To put things into perspective, here's how rasterization capabilities have been going up in Nvidia 70-class GPUs over the past decade.
The 5070 delivers nearly five times the native rendering potential of the GTX 970. Moreover, the gap between the 4070 and 5070 is sufficiently large to make upgrading worthwhile.
The performance gains are slightly lower in more modern API-based rendering workloads like 3DMark Time Spy. The 5070 stays slightly behind the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and the RX 7900 XTX.
Moving on to ray tracing performance, which historically has been Nvidia's strong suit, the 5070 stays slightly behind the 9070 XT again. However, the difference is justifiable given that the AMD GPU is $50 costlier.
In DirectX 12 Ultimate tests like 3DMark Steel Nomad, we notice a similar pattern. The 5070 stays behind the 9070 and 9070 XT, scoring 5335 points compared to the AMD GPUs' 5994 and 7093.
In real-time ray tracing, which is more realistic to expect in modern video games, we don't see the 5070 gaining ground as it stays behind the 7900 XTX, 9070, and 9070 XT yet again, proving that AMD's hardware-heavy approach consistently establishes a lead over Nvidia's efficiency-focused dual-die design.
For a final reproducibility test, we present 3DMark Speed Way results here. Utilizing DirectX 12 Ultimate, this test pushes GPUs to utilize their breadth of tech stacks: ray tracing to raw rendering and upscaling. The RTX 5070 manages to beat the 7900 XTX and 9070, while the 5090 laptop GPU and 9070 XT push ahead, given their beefier specs and VRAM amounts.
Finally, with DLSS turned on, all 50 series cards deliver triple-digit framerates in 3DMark's feature test, which is expected given support for multi-frame generation.
Gaming benchmarks
Now that we have established where the RTX 5070 stands with respect to the market, let's review performance in some video games. We don't compare numbers to other GPUs due to a lack of uniformity in test setups and video games being subjective in their workload formats.
That said, we present framerates achieved at 1440p across a batch of contemporary and classic titles, testing several settings combinations such as native rendering, ray tracing, and upscaling. Highest settings are used for all, with DLSS set to the Performance preset for best-case gains.
At native resolution, the RTX 5070 maintains over 100 FPS across titles with ray tracing disabled. However, the GPU isn't universally capable of 60+ FPS with full RT turned on. Luckily, DLSS multi-frame generation helps regain much of the lost frames and even delivers way higher performance (which potentially rivals the 4090, but we leave this comparison out as it isn't equitable).
Based on our testing, we recommend playing at native 1440p with DLAA turned on and Frame Generation set to the 3x preset for ideal experiences.
AI tests
Given that one of the highlights of the 50-series GPUs is AI, we tested the RTX 5070's capabilities in LLM inference. The card's Achilles heel is the limited 12 GB buffer, which prevents loading any substantially large LLMs. Here are tok/s numbers recorded across some small models:
Any model achieving less than 20 tok/s got offloaded to system RAM and was bottlenecked by the Ryzen 9 CPU's capabilities. These models don't fit into the 12 GB VRAM of the RTX 5070. We note decent speeds on Qwen 2.5 VL 7B, which represents the frontier of LLMs to play with on the card. With more aggressive quantization, you can load InternVL3 8B or Llama 3.1 8B to the card's memory, but performance degradation doesn't make it worthwhile.
That said, the card is decent for development: small models under 4B parameters run pretty well for testing in edge cases.
Stress tests
Let's look at the Zotac Solid OC GPU's temperatures and power draw characteristics next. For the thermal tests, the ambient temperature was maintained at 21°C.
When stressed with Furmark 2's GPU torture tools, the Solid OC barely touched 40°C, making it run just 19 degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. That's significant for a dual-slot card and proves that the vapor chamber design is plenty for the GB205 graphics chip. The card stays decently silent under full load, which helps with acoustics.
In terms of power draw, the RTX 5070 scales well and maintains a steady 250W demand throughout our test. Given the advanced PCIe 5.1 design with a dedicated 12 VHPWR-based board design, this behavior is expected.
Read more: Nvidia RTX 5080 review
Should you buy the RTX 5070?
Overall, the RTX 5070 is overshadowed by the competition: the 9070 and 9070 XT compete neck-to-neck. However, AMD has failed to maintain selling prices as well as Nvidia, and often RDNA 4 may be costlier. Moreover, if you're looking for a well-rounded setup to game and carry out AI workloads, the 5070 could be a decent choice under $600. Do note that any frontier work is impossible on the card, so most workloads have to be deployment-focused.
This makes recommending the 5070 rather difficult. Is it a fast GPU? Yes. Is it the best at any certain task at the price point? Not quite. It's a safe design with incremental choices, only appealing strongly to Nvidia fans upgrading from an older 60 or 70-class graphics card.
