The NVIDIA RTX 40 series family recently welcomed a new member, the RTX 4070 desktop graphics card. This happens to be the most affordable in the RTX 40-series lineup. It is also the most affordable graphics card that supports the DLSS 3 feature touted for having significantly better performance. While the new graphics card was equated to the RTX 3080 by some analysts, it stands out in several ways.
According to NVIDIA, the new RTX 4070 gives players the power to play most triple-A titles at 1440p resolution and over 100 frames per second or 1.4x the performance of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. The graphics card maker also said the RTX 4070 is able to achieve that level of performance while using about 50% lower power compared to the RTX 3080.
In addition to helping gamers save on energy bills, the new graphics card also comes with 2GB more memory compared to the RTX 3080. With RTX 4070, NVIDIA is promising up to 2.8x faster performance in NVIDIA Omniverse compared to RTX 3070Ti and 40% higher efficiency in video encoding using apps like OBS, and this all hinges on its support for AV1 encoding.
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Although NVIDIA RTX 4070 will clearly outperform the older RTX 3080, it is still no match for other graphics cards in the RTX 40 series. Firstly, it is the first graphics card in the 40 series with one NVENC encoder while the others have two each.
So, video creators will notice a lower performance when using the RTX 4070 compared to the other graphics processing unit (GPUs) in the series. Nevertheless, it makes up for this shortfall by becoming significantly cheaper than other graphics cards in the 40 series.
NVIDIA RTX 4070 makes use of AI technology
NVIDIA was able to achieve improved graphics with the RTX 4070 without inflating the price with the help of artificial intelligence. In the April 12 announcement, NVIDIA also revealed that it was upgrading the mid-range gaming chip with AI features.
The graphics card which was expected to start shipping on Thursday, April 13 will cost $599. Reuters reported that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is an upgrade to the RTX 3060. According to a March survey data from game distribution platform Steam, the RTX 3060 is the fourth most popular gaming chip on the market.
You can order your NVIDIA RTX 4070 from Amazon. Expect the price to be slightly higher at third-party retail shops.
NVIDIA’s data center chips have been used for training AI systems like ChatGPT and have spearheaded the company’s revenue growth in recent years. Nevertheless, about one-third of the company’s $26.9 billion revenue in the 2023 fiscal year still comes from gaming chips.
Overall, gaming revenue was down by 27% and it’s no thanks to the dwindling PC market. Most gaming PCs rely on Nvidia chips to render images onto high-resolution screens more quickly, thereby making the gaming experience more realistic and immersive.
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Instead of calculating the precise value of each pixel on a screen—which is usually time-consuming—the RTX 4070 gaming chip will use AI to predict what about 7 out of every 8 pixels should be as well as generate entire frames using AI.
“[A game] is not like a movie where everything’s been pre-recorded. It’s dynamic, it’s moving, and there’s user input,” explained Justin Walker, senior director of NVIDIA’s GeForce products. “I can’t just put a frame halfway between two frames. I have to really understand the motion between the two frames.”
What’s really special about Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)?
Basically, what DLSS does is use deep learning to produce high-resolution images from lower-resolution images. To achieve this, a neural network is trained using thousands of images from a particular video game in the presence and absence of anti-aliasing.
Subsequently, the network learns how to improve the images to anti-aliasing quality without requiring more performance. This trained neural network is packaged into a video game driver and runs during the game using CUDA cores that are present on NVIDIA’s GPUs. In other words, DLSS can achieve higher image resolution without needing the same performance overhead as anti-aliasing.
Over the past three years, NVIDIA has intensified efforts on its DLSS. When it was first released, it was a cool new feature with enormous potential than ray tracing. Other gaming chip makers quickly released their own versions of graphics cards with a similar feature.
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NVIDIA upped the game with the release of the DLSS Frame Generation which launched with the RTX 4090. As mentioned earlier, 7 out of 8 pixels are AI-generated. NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang even said in the future all pixels in the game will be AI-generated instead of rendered.
NVIDIA claims adoption of DLSS is high too with 79% of RTX 40-series, 71% of RTX 30-series, and 68% of RTX 20-series gamers turning on the feature in supported games. This is significantly higher compared to ray tracing hardware adoption which is 83% for the RTX 40-series, 56% for the RTX 30-series, and 42% for the RTX 20-series.
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