We were impressed by the gaming prowess of the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX’s Navi 31 GPU, but less so by their productivity performance. As if to emphasize the point, a few leaked Geekbench results for the upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti—formerly known as the RTX 4080 12GB—have surfaced.
On the application’s Compute benchmark, there are twenty-one results: seven for each of the three available APIs: Vulkan, OpenCL, and NVIDIA’s CUDA. Unsurprisingly, CUDA has the highest scores, but OpenCL is not far behind. Vulkan has a significant lag, but this is typical of GeForce hardware for whatever reason. These computing results have no bearing on gaming performance, so don’t worry too much about them.
The purpose of this post about pre-release GPUs is not to compare compute APIs. When comparing these leaked results to a variety of other graphics hardware, a few peculiar details emerge. For one, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is quite a distance behind the GeForce RTX 4080, making NVIDIA’s decision to “unlaunch” that card even more evident.
Nonetheless, comparisons to the red team are also quite intriguing. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti outperforms the previous-generation Radeon RX 6950 XT while likely consuming significantly less power. It also outperforms the Radeon RX 7900 XT and comes within striking distance of the XTX model; we suspect the new AMD cards are awaiting driver optimizations, as they perform poorly here.
Although we’ve already stated it, we feel compelled to reiterate that these Geekbench compute results have minimal bearing on gaming performance. Aside from Portal-like ray-tracing workloads, games rarely utilize the large compute arrays on RTX graphics cards, instead heavily taxing the raster graphics hardware and memory subsystems.
The majority of enthusiasts and leakers anticipate that the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will debut around CES in 2020. In reality, it is only three weeks away, despite how far away it may seem. The ultimate cost of this card is the key question surrounding it. Most estimates place it at a $100-to-$200 discount from the $899 list price of the canceled RTX 4080 12GB. Would that be sufficient to convince you to invest?
