MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X 12G OC Graphics Card

The GeForce RTX 4070 has arrived, presenting the most affordable entry in the GeForce RTX 40 Series lineup to date, and the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus Series falls within the MSRP price of USD 599, making it an attractive option. And if you’re looking to jump to the GeForce RTX 40 Series, you’ll be pleased to note that the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X delivers fantastic 1440p gaming performance in a two-slot build with just a single 8-pin power connector.

This is not only a first for the GeForce RTX 40 Series, but it’s indicative of the incredible efficiency gains brought to the table with the Ada Lovelace generation. With a total power rating of 200W, you’re looking at a very modest power draw for an x70 class GPU and one that delivers RTX 3080-like performance, plus the added benefit of DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology and creator-focused advances like AV1 video encoding.

When you put these features together with the impressive efficiency of the RTX 4070, you can see why it is an exciting addition to the GeForce RTX 40 Series lineup. It might become the most popular, too, especially with models like the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus Series sticking close to the MSRP set by NVIDIA.

As an “entry-level” GeForce RTX 4070, you might wonder what sets the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X 12G apart from more premium models hitting the market. Outside of things like the overall build being plastic (but still quite capable when it comes to cooling), there’s no out-of-the-box overclocking or a thermal design meant for tinkering. This isn’t bad because, as you’ll see, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X 12G’s performance is roughly on par with the Founders Edition model.

You can still fire up MSI Afterburner as the RTX 4070, even in MSRP form, has headroom to boost clock speeds.

There was a time when outright visual quality was the main driver for determining how advanced real-time rendering, especially in games, had progressed. There was also a time when pure grunt in raw hardware power determined how good a game could technically look and how fast it ran. We’re now at a point where visual quality and performance go hand-in-hand, with raw power only being a part of the equation.

The GeForce RTX 40 Series, the Ada Lovelace generation, is a lineup of GPUs built on a cutting-edge process node while leveraging and evolving all of the advances in AI and hardware-based ray-tracing that NVIDIA helped become mainstream with the GeForce RTX 30 Series.

Named after mathematician Ada Lovelace, considered the world’s first computer programmer, the GeForce RTX 40 Series is built on TSMC 4N process technology – a giant leap forward over the Samsung 8nm process used in the GeForce RTX 30 Series Ampere generation. From a pure numbers perspective, the full NVIDIA Ada GPU features 76.3 billion transistors, up to 18,432 CUDA Cores (70% more than the previous gen), and delivers clock speeds over 2.5 GHz while maintaining the same power requirements of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

Ada also introduces the latest generation of RT and Tensor Cores, with the latter introducing brand-new hardware responsible for the next iteration of AI rendering – DLSS 3. NVIDIA’s DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling is one of the reasons why raw power is no longer the be-all-end-all; it’s an AI-based form of upscaling that can provide a sizable boost to in-game performance without sacrificing visual fidelity. In fact, in some cases, it can improve upon native rendering.

For this reason alone, DLSS and other forms of algorithm-based upscaling have become some of the most talked about bits of technology in the PC gaming space.

Free frames, enough said.

DLSS 3 combines DLSS Super Resolution (DLSS 2) with NVIDIA Reflex to reduce system latency and the brand-new hardware-accelerated Frame Generation technology. Three bits of rendering tech = DLSS 3. And it’s exclusive to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

And it’s here where NVIDIA is looking to do what it has done for real-time graphics upscaling to the idea of frame-interpolation – or what they call Motion Plus in the TV world. Which, to be fair, is not a fair comparison on account of tech like Motion Plus being – well – terrible. But the fundamental idea is the same, albeit using specialized AI hardware in the GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards to generate and create entire frames.

So far, the results, although not without flaws, are impressive – with dramatic improvements to overall performance (in the frame-per-second stakes) seen in games like Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, and more.

As seen with DLSS 3, the Ada generation is much more than “smaller = more,” with NVIDIA introducing back-end technology in the form of Shader Execution Reordering – which effectively ensures render tasks happen more efficiently and without running into bottlenecks. This means a leap forward in the real-time rendering of hardware-intensive ray-tracing effects.