Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti vs AMD RX 7900 XTX battle gets a surprise twist

Nvidia’s purportedly imminent RTX 4070 Ti has popped up in a leaked benchmark on Twitter, showing the GPU edging out AMD’s RX 7900 XTX to the shock of many – but don’t get carried away with that idea (we’ll come back to why in our analysis).

The Geekbench result for the graphics card was shared by Benchleaks (as spotted by VideoCardz), and as ever with pre-release leaks, we should bear in mind that it might not be genuine.

We can see that the RTX 4070 Ti achieves a score of 214,654 for the OpenCL test in Geekbench 5. That’s 45% quicker than its predecessor, as VideoCardz observes, and 2% faster than AMD’s new RDNA 3 flagship.

Moreover, some spec details are imparted that match previous leakage – the presence of 7,680 CUDA Cores, notably, again underlining that this GPU should have the full loadout of cores for the AD104 chip – and we also get a glimpse of the boost speed here.

The latter is interesting because it’s different from the leaks we’ve already seen, being pegged at 2,730MHz rather than 2,610MHz.

Analysis: Does not compute...

A 45% generational bump is very impressive, of course, but there’s a heap of caveating to be done here. We can’t put too much faith in one benchmark, especially a leaked one, and in this case, Geekbench OpenCL is a compute test for GPUs. What we really need are gaming metrics, and most of all, real-world in-game benchmarks, and lots of them (as results can vary considerably from game to game when comparing different graphics cards).

As for the RTX 4070 Ti outdoing AMD’s new RX 7900 XTX – that’s clearly not right. This is the case because Nvidia GPUs (and drivers) are simply better at this particular compute test than AMD’s cards, which underlines just why you can’t put too much weight on a single benchmark result.

Aside from the score itself, there’s also that boost speed to consider, which doesn’t match another recent rumor, as noted above. What we assume has happened here is that while the RTX 4070 Ti has a boost of 2,610MHz, it has been overclocked in this test to 2,730MHz. In other words, we fully expect that the 4070 Ti will have the same boost speed as the canceled RTX 4080 12GB (it’d be very odd if it was faster, after all, being a lower-tier card in its new incarnation).

With more and more leaks appearing for the RTX 4070 Ti, this also suggests the speculation about a CES launch is on the money, and that we will see this GPU ushered onto the stage at Nvidia’s keynote on January 3 (followed by it being on shelves swiftly come January 5).

And whatever the performance level turns out to be, gamers won’t be scrutinizing that so much as the price/performance ratio, which is the really telling aspect – will the RTX 4070 Ti be good value? We’re not hopeful, sadly, for a good result on that score, but you never know…