Nvidia's RTX 4070 matches RTX 3080 in leaked benchmarks

With Nvidia's RTX 4070 expected to launch any day now, the leaks are coming thick and fast. We've already had Nvidia listing the unannounced graphics card in its own marketing materials. Now comes what appears to be a full suite of leaked benchmarks showing the RTX 4070 matching the old RTX 3080 for overall performance.

The benchmark slides posted by Videocardz are formatted in the usual Nvidia style and seem to be marketing materials or part of a review guide for journalists. Either way, they show the upcoming GPU matching the old RTX 3080 at 1440p with DLSS and ray tracing enabled.

So that's the same performance at $100 lower MSRP. Oh yeah, the slides also confirm the rumoured $599 pricing for the RTX 4070. Compared to the 3070 Ti, the slides show a 20% improvement, while the boost over the RTX 3070 is 30%.

The 'leaked' performance numbers also indicate much bigger improvements with frame generation switched on, which is a given since the old RTX 30-series GPUs don't support that feature.

A second slide has a game-by-game break down comparing the new RTX 4070 with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 2070 Super. Most of the results show huge gains courtesy of frame generation, but a more limited tranche of games is also included showing smaller gains in games that don't support the feature.

If you're wondering, in this leak at least there are no pure raster results without DLSS and ray tracing enabled. Given that all RTX 40-series GPUs have enhancements for ray-tracing performance versus older RTX 30 boards, you might expect the performance boost for plain old raster games to be a bit smaller. In other words, if these benchmarks are genuine they imply a generational gain over the RTX 3070 for pure raster performance of less than 30%.

Overall, these numbers look plausible and are likely to be the real deal and also match up with another leak from a week ago or so. If so, the RTX 4070 will offer only a small improvement in performance per dollar unless you consider frame rates with frame generation enabled. While it is a very useful feature, however, that is a stretch.

Frame generation doesn't help where you need it most—at times when you simply can't achieve a playable frame rate because it adds latency just when you don't want it. What it's great for is making gameplay smoother where your frame rates are playable but not quite as smooth as you'd like.

Anyway, by all accounts we'll know soon enough exactly how the RTX 4070 stacks up. Watch this space.