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As ever, when talking about graphics cards, the word "affordable" is relative. On March 5, Nvidia is bringing its most affordable GeForce RTX 50 series card so far to market. Graphics cards based on the GeForce RTX 5070 GPU begin to ship for an expected $549 MSRP, making it not only the lowest-cost entry in Nvidia’s new RTX 50 series to date, but also $200 cheaper (on a list-price basis, anyway) than the Editors'-Choice-award-winning Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. The RTX 5070 Ti is the next step up in the family and starts at an ostensible $749.
One thing to note, though: Here in early 2025, the prices for Nvidia's new cards have been pretty fungible—and no fun for shoppers. The actual street prices for these cards, so far, have often been well higher than their MSRPs, due to strong demand and short supply, apart from the usual variances among models. We'll see what happens with the RTX 5070, but until Nvidia decides to roll out its inevitable GeForce RTX 5060-class cards, this price zone from about $550 to $800 is the state of the market for current-gen mid-market cards.
Even AMD's Radeon RX 9070-series cards, coming on March 6 and starting at $549, won't be any cheaper at MSRP, and could see the same price inflation. But it will be worth seeing how they perform, and what the price trends look like, before jumping in with either of these cards; we can't report on the AMD cards' performance quite yet. (The answer to the question of which of these GeForce cards is right for you could well be "neither.")
Naturally, the RTX 5070's lower price versus the RTX 5070 Ti comes with some performance trade-offs, but a $200 price savings can go a long way toward building out the rest of your gaming PC. Determining which of these new graphics cards is right for you and your next gaming PC will ultimately depend on your budget and performance expectations: The RTX 5070 naturally holds a value advantage, especially for 1440p gaming, while you'll have a better 4K gaming experience with an RTX 5070 Ti.
Specs Compared: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 vs. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
The RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti are members of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 series of graphics cards, which means they share the same internal architecture, which Nvidia dubs "Blackwell." This makes comparing them relatively straightforward, as the hardware resources in each are functionally identical. However, three key points of difference still affect performance: memory, clock speed, and overall resource count.
Nvidia's GB205 GPU powers the GeForce RTX 5070’s die, which has 31.1 billion transistors. The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti follows the Nvidia GB203 graphics chip design, with 45.6 billion transistors. That makes it roughly 50% larger than the GB205 graphics chip inside the RTX 5070.
Now, know that the raw transistor counts don’t directly translate into differences in performance. But they do provide a general idea of how this comparison will go while explaining the two cards' price differences. I'll dive into the performance nitty-gritty shortly, but as for cost, suffice it to say: The more transistors, the larger the chip; the larger the chip on the same architecture, the more it generally costs to produce.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has a 45% advantage in hardware resources over the RTX 5070 across CUDA cores, texture mapping units (TMUs), and ray-tracing (RT) cores. The Ti's advantage in raster operation processors (ROPs) isn’t quite as significant, with a 20% difference.
Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti also has 33% more memory resources and speeds across the board. The Ti has 16GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit interface, while the RTX 5070 has just 12GB of GDDR7 and a smaller 192-bit memory connection. This difference in memory capacity and bandwidth isn’t as significant as other hardware resources and isn’t likely to cause any significant issues for the RTX 5070 at the resolutions we'd expect it to be run at. The RTX 5070 still has 672GBps of memory bandwidth, which should be sufficient to avoid major bottlenecks. (Note: Both competing AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPUs will have 16GB.)
The two graphics cards' clock speeds are also relatively similar, with the latter clocked just slightly higher. Due to its larger core count, the RTX 5070 Ti is rated to consume more power, but less than you might expect: just 20% additional over the RTX 5070.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 vs. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Models and Coolers
For testing and review, we received an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition directly from Nvidia. This card features a dual-fan thermal solution and looks and feels premium. However, it doesn’t have much in the way of LED lights, so if you want a card with lights or a flashier design, you should check out models (RTX 5070 or RTX 5070 Ti alike) made by Nvidia’s board partners. Also note: Just before our embargo on this card lifted, Nvidia informed us that this Founders card won't be available until late March. Only partner versions of the RTX 5070 will be available at launch.
Nvidia doesn’t sell a Founders Edition version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, so I reviewed an Asus triple-fan model called the Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GDDR7 instead. You can find cards using both GPUs from any of Nvidia’s board partners, including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, and Zotac.
The RTX 5070 Founders Edition card employs Nvidia's 12VHPWR power supply interface and works with an included adapter to connect to your power supply. With the RTX 5070 Ti, since you'll be looking at Nvidia's partner cards only, you'll likely be connecting your PSU's 8-pin power connectors straight to the card. (The same applies if you're looking at partner versions of the RTX 5070.)
Also, most cards supply three DisplayPort outputs and a single HDMI out, but you'll want to check the specs of the individual card you are looking at.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 vs. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: AI Performance
Nvidia rates the AI hardware inside the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 at 988 AI total operations per second (TOPS); the more-capable GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is rated for 1,406 AI TOPS. If you are concerned about AI performance, this suggests that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the better option.
How did that shake out in our testing? We used UL's Procyon AI Text Generation Test to run some sample AI workloads on four different common LLMs...
The Procyon test clearly showed that the RTX 5070 Ti was the faster of the two. Performance varies depending on the LLM in question, with the Llama 2 model showing the greatest gulf between the cards. Here, we saw a 60% difference in the overall score and a 40% advantage for the RTX 5070 Ti in the number of tokens produced each second. Most of the other LLMs showed closer to a 30% difference in the number of tokens produced per second, but the LLM used clearly makes a significant difference.
AI performance amounts to more than just comparisons of TOPS and LLM performance, but these early indicators show the gap between the two cards.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 vs. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Gaming Performance
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is clearly faster in PC gaming, too. The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti was 36% quicker than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 in the highly demanding AAA title Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K. This is, coincidentally, the same difference between the two cards in list price/MSRP, with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti costing 36% more than the RTX 5070. The performance difference was slightly smaller at lower resolutions, which suggests that you get somewhat better performance per dollar spent with the RTX 5070 while gaming at sub-4K resolutions. (Or at least you do in Cyberpunk 2077!) At 4K, the RTX 5070 Ti better justified its added cost.
We’ll spare you a tedious breakout of the percentage differences between the two cards at all resolutions in all the games we tested. See the tables above if you're keen on the nitty-gritty. In summary, though, we saw generally similar results in other test games to what we saw in Cyberpunk 2077 across the board. I found a few instances in which the two cards performed closer to each other, such as in Far Cry 6 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which supports the RTX 5070 as the better value pick of the two cards.
Note, though: The RTX 5070 Ti's extra performance may help you put off upgrading for longer down the road, which makes up in part for it carrying a premium compared with the RTX 5070.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 vs. GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Power Draw and Thermals
We test the power consumption of our GPU testbed PC using a Kill-A-Watt wall meter. This gives us a rough idea of the power consumption of different graphics cards, as only the graphics card is changed between tests.
Despite its significantly higher core count and much better performance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti only used about 15% more power (at the wall, under peak load in our test games) than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 did. This marks it as the more energy-efficient of the two, even though it used more power overall.
The Asus model of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti also operated cooler than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition, with Nvidia's RTX 5070 card running around 10 degrees C warmer than the RTX 5070 Ti. We haven’t tested an equivalent version of the RTX 5070 from one of Nvidia’s board partners yet, but based on these results, I’d shoot for buying one of those instead of a Founders Edition model if thermal performance is a key issue for you, or you plan to run your RTX 5070 in a compact PC case.
Verdict: Go GeForce RTX 5070 for Value, Go RTX 5070 Ti for Performance
Asserting that either of these graphics cards is unreservedly "better" than the other across the board would be disingenuous; each card serves different gaming goals. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti unquestionably produces the better performance overall of the two, and it is more energy efficient, even while consuming more power. With that, the RTX 5070 Ti is better if you value that extra speed or the peace of mind that better efficiency gets you.
As for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, it's not as fast as the RTX 5070 Ti, but its lower price presents a better value in terms of how much performance you get per dollar spent. However, I suggest checking out an RTX 5070 model from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, or Zotac instead of a Founders Edition model based on our test sample’s thermal performance.
Of course, this calculus all hinges on the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 9070-class cards coming right on these cards' heels. Stay tuned.
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