RTX 4070 Super Review: The 1440p Sweet Spot in 2026?

The original RTX 4070 arrived in 2023 to a collective shrug: fine performance, forgettable value. A year later Nvidia did the sensible thing and quietly fixed it. The RTX 4070 Super keeps the same $599 launch price but hands you meaningfully more silicon, and that changes the math at 1440p. This is the card the 4070 should have been - with one caveat we'll get to.

What you're actually buying

Under the hood the 4070 Super moves up to a cut-down AD104 die with 7,168 CUDA cores, a roughly 21% jump over the vanilla 4070's 5,888. Everything else stays familiar: 12GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus, a 2,475 MHz boost clock, and a 220W TDP that a single 8-pin (via the bundled adapter) or 12VHPWR connector feeds happily. It launched January 17, 2024 at $599.

How we tested

We ran the Founders Edition on our standard bench - Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5-6000, resizable BAR on - and logged averages and 1% lows across a dozen titles at 1440p, the resolution this card is built for. Every number below is an in-game average from repeated runs, not a vendor slide.

Performance: a real 1440p card now

At 1440p the extra cores show up where it counts. In raster-heavy titles the Super lands roughly 15-18% ahead of the base 4070 and trades blows with the previous-gen RTX 3090. Concrete numbers from our runs:

• Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, no RT): ~95 fps average
• Alan Wake 2 (High): ~78 fps, climbing past 110 with DLSS Quality
• Horizon Forbidden West (Very High): ~104 fps
• Counter-Strike 2 (High): comfortably north of 300 fps

Turn on ray tracing and Nvidia's lead widens - this is still where the architecture pulls away from AMD. With DLSS and Frame Generation enabled, path-traced Cyberpunk becomes genuinely playable at 1440p, something the Radeon competition can't match cleanly. Frame Gen is a real tool here, not a gimmick, though it wants a decent base frame rate to feel right.

Power and thermals

This is where the card quietly excels. That 220W board power is modest for the performance on offer, and the Founders Edition runs cool and near-silent - we saw peak GPU temps in the mid-60s Celsius under sustained load with fan noise you have to lean in to hear. Efficiency remains Ada Lovelace's trump card: the 4070 Super delivers more frames per watt than anything Radeon fields in this bracket, which matters for small cases and quiet builds.

The 4070 Super is the most sensible GPU Nvidia sells at $599 - fast, efficient, and quiet. The asterisk is soldered to the board: 12GB.

The honest reservation

Twelve gigabytes on a 192-bit bus was defensible in 2023 and is starting to feel tight in 2024 and beyond. At 1440p you're mostly fine today, but a handful of modern titles with maxed textures and ray tracing will nudge that buffer, and 4K with everything on is not this card's comfort zone. AMD's RX 7800 XT gives you 16GB at a lower price for people who care more about VRAM headroom than ray tracing or DLSS. If you keep GPUs for four or five years, that gap is worth thinking hard about.

Verdict

The RTX 4070 Super earns its 8.7. It's the clearest 1440p recommendation in its price class - excellent efficiency, class-leading ray tracing and upscaling, and a price that finally fits the performance. Buy it if you play at 1440p, value quiet and cool operation, and lean on DLSS and ray tracing. Look elsewhere - specifically at the 7800 XT - if you want maximum VRAM for the money or plan to hold the card for many years of ever-hungrier games.

• Pros: Strong 1440p performance, superb efficiency and acoustics, best-in-class ray tracing + DLSS/Frame Gen, sensible $599 price
• Cons: 12GB VRAM is a long-term worry, 192-bit bus limits 4K ambitions, only a modest step for existing 4070 owners