RTX 5070 vs 4090: The Marketing Myth Exposed

Skye Newman

It is just a complete and utter piss-take. I- I- I was looking at this slide from their presentation, right, and I literally had to rub my eyes. Nvidia actually stood up there, in front of everyone, and tried to claim this new... this five hundred and fifty dollar RTX 5070 is, and I quote, on par with an RTX 4090. A bloody forty ninety! The sixteen hundred dollar monster from last gen! I mean, are they fucking mental or do they just think we are completely stupid?

Eric Marquette

It is, uh, it is quite the bold claim, Skye. To be fair, when they launched it back in early 2025, the marketing department went full sci-fi on us. But- but you have to look at how they arrived at that metric. It- it wasn't raw, traditional rasterization. They weren't comparing actual silicon power. They were using Multi-Frame Generation, or MFG, specifically running DLSS 4 with four times frame generation active on the Blackwell card, compared to a 4090 running native or with basic DLSS 3. It- it's a completely rigged comparison.

Skye Newman

It's a fucking magic trick, Eric! That's what it is. It's like comparing a bicycle to a rocket ship but saying, oh, if we put the bicycle on a high-speed conveyor belt and let a drone carry it, they both go the same speed! It's absolute bollocks. They are using fake frames... synthetic bloody pixels... to pad out the numbers so they can trick some poor kid into thinking they're getting flagship performance for a mid-range price. The raw hardware on the 5070 isn't even close to a forty ninety. It- it- it's not even in the same league, is it?

Eric Marquette

No, it really isn't. When you strip away the synthetic frames, the actual physical execution units are world's apart. The RTX 4090 has over sixteen thousand CUDA cores. The new RTX 5070 has... well, it has just over six thousand. I mean, you don't need a degree in computer engineering to see the massive deficit there. But Nvidia's entire strategy for 2025 and now here in 2026 is based on this idea that software can replace silicon. They want us to believe that AI generation is the same as raw rendering power.

Skye Newman

Well, it's not the fucking same, is it? Because when you actually play a game, you can feel the difference. You feel the delay. You feel the absolute lag. It's like playing through jelly. They're selling us a dream built on a pile of marketing shit, and it makes me so angry because people buy into it. They see the graph, they see the big bar going up, and they think, oh brilliant, 4090 performance for five hundred and fifty quid! But it's a lie. A massive, corporate lie.

Eric Marquette

And that brings us to the actual hardware bottleneck, which- which is where the marketing illusion completely falls apart. The RTX 5070 only has twelve gigabytes of VRAM. It's GDDR7, yes, which is faster, but it's running on a narrow one hundred and ninety-two bit bus. Skye, in 2026, twelve gigabytes of video memory for a mid-to-high-end card is... well, it's incredibly restrictive.

Skye Newman

It is a joke! Twelve gigs? My phone's probably got more memory than that soon. We are in 2026, games are massive, the textures are bloody huge, and they're giving us twelve gigabytes on a five hundred and fifty dollar card? It's a joke, Eric. If you try to run any modern game at 4K with high textures, you're going to hit a wall. The card just runs out of space, starts chugging, and everything goes to absolute shit.

Eric Marquette

Exactly. When the VRAM buffer fills up, the card has to overflow into the system RAM over the PCIe bus, and that causes massive stuttering. But the real nightmare... the absolute horror show of this card... is the latency when you actually try to use that Multi-Frame Generation to get those high framerates Nvidia promised. When you turn on MFG 4X to make the game look like it's running at over a hundred frames per second, the internal render rate is actually incredibly low. The card is rendering, say, thirty real frames, and then fabricating three fake frames for every real one.

Skye Newman

Right, so your eyes see a smooth image, but your mouse... your controls... they are still stuck on thirty frames per second. Or worse!

Eric Marquette

Much worse, actually. Because of the way the frames have to be queued and analyzed by the optical flow accelerator to create those synthetic frames, the latency balloons. We're talking about a delay between you moving your mouse and seeing the action on screen that can reach five hundred... or even seven hundred milliseconds after a few minutes of play. That is over half a second of delay, Skye. It is literally unplayable.

Skye Newman

Half a fucking second? Are you kidding me? If I'm playing a shooter or even an action game, half a second is the difference between winning and getting my head blown off! That is absolutely mental. Who the fuck wants to play a game with half a second of lag? It's like trying to drive a car but the steering wheel only reacts a second after you turn it. It's a bloody death trap for gaming! And they have the cheek to call this next-gen progress?

Eric Marquette

It is a technical compromise that Nvidia is trying to brute-force through marketing. They expect features like Reflex to keep latency in check, but Reflex can only do so much when you're generating three synthetic frames for every real one. The queue gets clogged, the VRAM gets choked because storing those high-resolution frame buffers for analysis takes up even more of that precious twelve gigabytes, and the whole system just collapses under its own weight. It's a massive design flaw for a card in this price bracket.

Skye Newman

So, let's talk about the real numbers then. Cut through all their dodgy software tricks. What happens when you actually test this piece of shit in raw rasterization? Like, normal gaming without all the fake frame generation rubbish turned on?

Eric Marquette

Well, the real-world benchmarks tell a very different story from Nvidia's slides. If we look at heavy titles from the last year or two... things like Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, or Black Myth: Wukong... at 1440p native, the RTX 5070 is... well, it's decent, but it's certainly no 4090. In Cyberpunk at 1440p Ultra with no ray tracing, it averages around eighty-five frames per second. That's... it's about a ten percent bump over the old RTX 4070 Super, and actually slightly slower than a 4070 Ti.

Skye Newman

Wait, so it's slower than a last-gen card that you could buy a year ago? The 4070 Ti? Are you serious?

Eric Marquette

In pure rasterization, yes, in several games. In Starfield, the RTX 5070 hits about seventy-eight frames per second at 1440p, while the 4070 Ti Super averages eighty-two. And in Black Myth: Wukong, which is heavily GPU-bound, the 5070 struggles to maintain a locked sixty at native 1440p Cinematic settings, hovering around fifty-four frames per second. So, the reality is that this card is just a very mild, iterative generational bump. It is absolutely not a revolution.

Skye Newman

It's a lateral move is what it is! They've just rebranded the same tier of performance, put a shiny new 50-series sticker on it, and expected us to throw our money at them. It's so lazy. What about the power and thermals though? Is there anything good there, or is that a shambles as well?

Eric Marquette

To be fair, the Blackwell architecture is efficient. The Founders Edition we looked at draws about two hundred and thirty-three watts under full load, which is quite low for this tier. And it runs reasonably cool... around seventy-four degrees Celsius in a standard case with the fans at a moderate, quiet spin. So, physically, the card is well-built. It's quiet, it doesn't run hot, and it won't blow up your electricity bill.

Skye Newman

Great, so it's a very quiet, very cool disappointment. It's like a fridge that doesn't actually get cold but, hey, at least it doesn't make any noise! It's just... it's frustrating, Eric. Because the engineering team clearly did some decent work on the power efficiency, but the bean counters and the marketing executives just ruined the whole package by starving it of memory and lying about what it can actually do.

Eric Marquette

So, Skye, let's bring this all home. We're in the middle of 2026. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is sitting on shelves for five hundred and fifty dollars. Is it a trap, or is there actually a market for this card?

Skye Newman

It is a trap, mate. A hundred percent. It's a shiny, expensive trap designed to catch people who don't know any better. If you have five hundred and fifty dollars to spend right now, buying a card with only twelve gigs of VRAM is absolute madness. You're buying immediate obsolescence. You're going to buy this card, turn on a game next year, and realize you can't even play on high settings because the memory is choked. It's bullshit.

Eric Marquette

I- I have to agree on the value proposition. When you look at the competition... I mean, AMD's offerings, even their slightly older RX 7000 series cards like the 7900 XT, often drop to around this price point and they come with twenty gigabytes of VRAM. Twenty! That is a massive buffer that will easily last you another four or five years without ever having to worry about texture sizes or memory allocation.

Skye Newman

Exactly! Or look at the used market! You could probably grab a used 3090 or a 4070 Ti Super with sixteen gigs for similar money, and you won't be dealing with that absolute joke of a seven hundred millisecond latency issue with the fake frames. My advice to anyone listening? Do not buy this card. Do not let Nvidia trick you with their dodgy graphs and their fake frame marketing. Save your money, get something with sixteen gigs or more, and let this overpriced piece of plastic rot on the shelves.

Eric Marquette

Well, that is about as unfiltered as it gets. Don't fall for the hype, check the actual hardware specs, and protect your wallet. Alright, that's our take on the 5070. Thanks for hanging out with us, and we'll catch you in the next one.

Skye Newman

Yeah, don't get scammed, people. See ya.