The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 is finally official, and Nvidia is making one spectacularly bold claim about its performance. The company has declared this new $549, mid-range gaming GPU will be faster than the RTX 4090, though as you might imagine there's a catch.
With RTX 5090, it revealed a host of interesting new products and technologies. However, it was the company's bold claim about the RTX 5070 that was perhaps most striking.
For context, the RTX 4090 has 16,384 CUDA cores, a 384-bit memory interface, and 24GB of VRAM. Even with new architectural tweaks and the RTX 5070 using faster GDDR7 VRAM, that's one hell of a specs gap to make up.
Sure enough, Nvidia's claim that the RTX 5070 offers "4090 performance at $549" comes with the major caveat that such a feat is "impossible without artificial intelligence." Specifically, it's the new card's access to 40TFLOPs of AI processing power and Nvidia's new neural rendering and DLSS 4 technologies that allow this card to achieve such performance.
DLSS 4, which the company announced alongside its new GPUs, is seemingly the major powerhouse for this performance leap. Like previous versions of DLSS, it uses AI to generate new pixels to help upscale lower resolution frames to higher resolution frames and then can also generate entirely new frames.
Where DLSS goes beyond the frame generation of DLSS 3, though, is that it can now generate up to three new frames rather than just one. That means that you can effectively get four times the perceived frame rate of rendering without frame generation or twice the frame rate compared to previous versions of frame generation.
What isn't clear from Nvidia's presentation is whether its claims about the RTX 5070's performance versus the RTX 4090 are with the RTX 4090 also using the single frame generation of DLSS 3 or with the card only doing conventional rendering without DLSS.
If it's the latter, then the company's claim is wildly misleading. However, if it's the former, that still implies that the RTX 5070 provides a significant boost in raw performance compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4070.
What seems certain, though, is that AMD is going to have quite the fight on its hands as that company has pitched its new flagship card, the best graphics card options in this highly competitive price range.
If you want to see how Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture performs with DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Gen, make sure you also read our full GeForce RTX 5070 review to see how the claims about it matching the 4090 hold up to scrutiny.