Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 Super was meant to dethrone AMD’s RX 7800 XT, but it’s surprising how similar the two GPUs really are.
Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 Super feels like a direct response to AMD. After losing in some rankings to AMD’s RX 7800 XT, this Super refresh appears like Nvidia’s bid to reclaim the performance crown among the list best graphics cards. Which is the better card for your next PC build, though?
We’ve tested both GPUs extensively, which you can read about in our RTX 4070 Super review and RX 7800 XT review. Here, we’re putting the cards head-to-head to see which GPU comes out on top. And it’s a much closer battle than we expected.Pricing and availability
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super is the newer GPU between these two, and will launch on January 17 for a list price of $600. There are models available at that price, but you’ll commonly find overclocked versions for slightly more. We’ve seen prices around $650, with some of the most extreme models pushing up to $700.
Still, you only need to spend $600 to get an RTX 4070 Super. Stock is plentiful, at least at the time of writing, so we don’t expect prices to shoot up out of nowhere.
The RX 7800 XT is in a slightly different position. The card released late last year for a list price of $500, but it didn’t stay at that price for long. Due to how the card performed compared to the base RTX 4070, most models rose to around $550. Nvidia’s Super model is reversing that price increase, but most models are still listed above list price.
At the time of writing, we only found one model available at $500. Most others are listed between $530 and $550. It’s hard to say where prices go from here. With the RTX 4070 Super at $600, it’s hard to imagine the RX 7800 XT will drop below its original list price. For now, we’re looking at a price difference of somewhere between $50 and $100, with the RTX 4070 Super being the more expensive card.Specs
It’s not worth comparing the core specs of an AMD and Nvidia graphics card. AMD and Nvidia count their cores differently, and those cores interact with clock speed differently. Nvidia has twice as many cores, and even a slightly faster clock speed. But that doesn’t actually mean much of anything when it comes to performance.
The two specs we can compare are power and memory. In terms of power, Nvidia definitely has an edge. The RTX 4070 Super has a Total Graphics Power (TGP) of 220 watts, while AMD comes in higher at 263W. That said, AMD uses two traditional 8-pin power connectors while most RTX 4070 Super models opt for a 12VHPWR 16-pin connector. If you don’t have an ATX 3.0 power supply, that means you’ll need to use an adapter with more RTX 4070 Super models, which can be a bit unsightly in a case.
