Nvidia’s RTX 5070 was meant to be a 4090 killer, but early benchmarks don’t agree

By Monica J. White Published February 24, 2025

When Nvidia announced the RTX 50-series, it said that the RTX 5070 would offer performance equivalent to the last-gen flagship at a fraction of the price. Since then, gamers have been looking forward to seeing how this plays out, and we just got our first hint. According to an early benchmark, the RTX 5070 may be far from dethroning the RTX 4090, which remains one of the best graphics cards.

These benchmarks, first spotted by VideoCardz, popped up on Geekbench earlier today. We’ve got two tests to dig into, including Vulkan and OpenCL. I know what you’re probably thinking — these benchmarks aren’t the best way to tell whether a graphics card is a gaming beast or not, but for now, they’re all we’ve got, and they do give us a bit of a reference point for the RTX 5070.

The GPU scored 188,712 in Vulkan and 187,414 in OpenCL. It was paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D  and 32GB RAM; however, the latter was running at a very low MT/s, so there might have been some error in Geekbench or the system in question.

Comparing these scores to the recently released RTX 5070 Ti reveals a sizeable gap between the two, with the 5070 being up to 20% slower. This isn’t an unexpected result, given that the GPU is set to start at $550. However, we do have to account for various issues with availability and high pricing. I honestly won’t be surprised if this card is priced at $750 and up in the first few weeks; after all, I spotted the RTX 5070 Ti for up to $1,900 last week. This week, it’s largely sold out.

Aside from being slower than the RTX 5070 Ti, the RTX 5070 does seem to offer a decent generational uplift. These two benchmarks place it somewhere between the RTX 4070 and the RTX 4070 Ti, which is fair, but it’s also a far cry from the RTX 4090-equivalent performance Nvidia teased during its CES 2025 keynote.

Of course, that performance might still be possible with DLSS 4. Although the initial announcement sounded catchy, most gamers quickly figured out that the RTX 5070 is unlikely to offer the same performance as the RTX 4090 if we’re talking about “real” frame rates. Instead, using Nvidia’s Multi-Frame Generation tech may push the GPU to new heights, and some of those heights might outperform the $1,600 RTX 4090. These early benchmarks only serve to prove that Nvidia’s claim is likely heavily supported by DLSS 4.

It won’t be long before we can check out the RTX 5070 in the flesh. The card is set to launch on March 5, and reviewers will undoubtedly try to verify whether the RTX 5070 can truly outperform the RTX 4090.