Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: 4080 territory, or more with an overclock

We're once again dedicating a whole page to DLSS 4 and multi frame generation as it's one of the few defining factors of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs over their Maxwell counterparts. It's also a strong point of Nvidia's marketing efforts, to the point where CEO Jensen Huang even made the claim that the upcoming RTX 5070 offers RTX 4090 "performance". We're looking forward to that particular comparison when we look at the 5070 - presumably in March - but there's plenty of meat on the bone for the 5070 Ti right now.

First up, let's quickly recap on what DLSS 4 multi frame generation does and how it works. It's an offshoot of the existing technology found in 40-series cards. Essentially the current frame is rendered as per normal, and the following one too, which is then buffered. The original frame-gen implementation would then use an optical flow accelerator tied into the game engine to calculate an intermediate frame, boosting frame-rate. The thing is that that buffering the extra frame and calculating the middle image takes time, which means increased latency. Multi frame generation works in much the same way but with key differences: optical flow is now handled by the tensor cores and two, three and four interpolated frames are possible, while pacing hardware within the Blackwell architecture works to ensure smooth delivery of those extra frames.

So the bad news is that frame generation adds latency, but the good news - relatively - is that the amount of latency added by two or three generated images vs the standard two is more limited. There still aren't a huge number of DLSS 4 games in the wild, especially when we began testing during the 5090 review period, but Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 are supported and tie in nicely with our automated benchmarking technology, so let's dig in.

In Cyberpunk, running at native 4K with RT Overdrive enabled, we get an unplayable 16fps with 175ms of latency. Adding in DLSS performance mode brings latency down to 41ms as frame-rates climb to 53fps. Multi frame generation of course adds to that frame-rate further at a cost of latency, all the way up to 157fps at the 4x setting with 58ms of average lag.

What I'm noticing with latency here, compared with 5080 and especially 5090, is that there are more appreciable jumps when moving between MFG variants - from around 10ms to 17ms as we add more frames.

It's interesting to look at how much frame generation the 5070 Ti needs to match the 4090. For our testing in Cyberpunk, it looks like 3x MFG on the 5070 Ti is the closest match to the 4090's output with 2x MFG. However, though frame-rates are nearly matched at 128fps and 126fps for 4090 and 5070 Ti respectively, the latency figures are not. These are 39ms for the 4090 and 55ms on the 5070 Ti - a 16ms difference. If we engage 4x MFG on the 5070 Ti, that latency differential increases to 19ms, despite a nearly 25 percent edge in frame-rate for the Blackwell GPU.

Alan Wake has a much higher base latency than Cyberpunk, which means that frame generation faces a much harder challenge to deliver a responsive result. The average frame-rate for the 5070 Ti in our testing is 59fps - higher than the 53fps we got in Cyberpunk - but the latency is significantly worse, at 83ms, vs the 52ms we measured in the CD Projekt Red title.

That means by the time we add frame gen, the latency figures are getting unreasonably high. A 109fps frame-rate feels nice, but a latency of 106ms definitely doesn't. Again, with MFG 3x on 5070 Ti we can equal the frame-rates of regular 2x frame generation on the 4090, but the latency penalty is huge at 41ms.

Instead, it's probably better to opt for a lower resolution - 1440p. That brings MFG 4x lag down from 108ms to 68ms, essentially a match for 4K on the 4090.

The 5070 Ti can certainly deliver a good frame generation experience then, but my testing only reinforces that your base latency is super-important. The lower you can get it, the less impactful the extra lag is. Of course, the perception of lag in the first place varies from person to person, so it's worth experimenting with to see how you find it. What might be offputting to one person might be unnoticable by another, so it's worth the time investment to see where you fall on that spectrum.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Analysis

• Introduction
• RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Cyberpunk 2077
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
• RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077
• Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
• Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• DLSS 4 and Path Tracing: Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2 [This Page]
• Conclusions, value and recommendations