Nvidia RTX 5070 hands-on preview: a sneak peek at the unreleased RTX Blackwell card hitting triple digit frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p and Avowed at 4K

For the past week or so I've been playing around with Nvidia's RTX 5070 graphics card, the next outing in the new RTX Blackwell series of GPUs. It's the cheapest of all the RTX 50-series cards so far with a $549 MSRP and the promise of RTX 4090 performance. Though recent experience has taught us that, outside of the resolutely MSRP Founders Edition I have here, such pricing is an ephemeral thing when it comes to such scarcity in the market.

We also now have more genuine GPU competition on the horizon in this price bracket, too, with AMD yesterday announcing its own $549 and $599 graphics cards. So, the RTX 5070 has got its work cut out trying to make a place for itself in this increasingly busy end of the GPU business.

And who's that good for? Us! As PC gamers, increased competition in a more affordable end of the market can only be a good thing. So, hooray, the GPU world is looking all kinds of more exciting all of a sudden.

Recent experience has also taught us to maybe be a little wary of marketing hyperbole from GPU manufacturers. How do those RTX 4090 performance for $549 claims stand up? Well, you'll have to wait for our review to see what the card can do with or without the magic of Multi Frame Generation compared with Nvidia's previous great.

Neither the RTX 5070 nor its Radeon-shaped competition are out until next week, and reviews of the cards aren't going to arrive until just before they're on the shelves. But I've got a little sneak peek for you, an experiential dive into the performance of the new Nvidia card when it comes to both Cyberpunk 2077—Nvidia's poster-child for pretty much every new graphical advance it's made in the past couple of years—and the latest Obsidian RPG, Avowed.

Nvidia RTX 5070 performance: Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 | RT Ultra preset | 1440p | DLSS: Quality | Frame Gen x4

This is what passes for a mid-range card in these expensive times of ours, but even though it is still a fair chunk of change, I wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to push the settings up to top ray tracing levels in a game like this and still get performance I'd be happy with.

And yet, that's exactly what I've been doing with the RTX 5070 and Cyberpunk 2077 at RT Ultra. Because I'm a sadist? Not a bit of it; because Multi Frame Generation is a feature that is surprisingly still capable of delivering even this far down the RTX Blackwell GPU stack.

The video here is of the RTX 5070 running in the PC Gamer test rig. That's an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, with 32 GB DDR5-6000, and a ton of storage to house all the games on my Steam account. Well, some of them. There are a lot. Cyberpunk 2077 here is running on the RT Ultra preset at 1440p, with DLSS set to Quality, and Frame Generation on its most extreme 4x mode.

This is pretty big boi GPU stuff, and the RTX 5070 is doing seriously well handling it. I'm not allowed to go into full specifics of performance—embargos and all that—but you can see for yourself it's pretty damned smooth. I'm looking at over 200 fps on average here and even in the more frantic sections, where I utterly fail to headshot a bunch of chooms, you're not getting any real artifacting from the addition of another three AI-generated frames slapped in between every two rendered ones.

What of latency? Well, again, I can't divulge numbers today, but the PCL certainly isn't at a level where I'd be concerned about playing an absorbing single player game for its entirety like this. What Nvidia has done with MFG is very impressive—I'm not going to say I wouldn't rather have triple-digit frame rates at top settings with a $549 card using traditional rendering, but until we get there I'll take it.

Nvidia RTX 5070 performance: Avowed

Avowed | Epic preset | 4K | DLSS: Quality | Frame Gen x4

Avowed is an interesting one, because we've been a bit confused by some of the performance levels that you will experience in the game, where it can feel not that smooth even if you're getting high frame rates. There's a certain level ag which it can feel rather janky, even if you're hitting 90 fps, almost like you're getting the dreaded microstutter.

But here it is, running on the RTX 5070 at 4K Epic settings, at well over 100 fps and feeling buttery smooth. Again, this is thanks to 4x Multi Frame Gen being enabled and with DLSS set to the Quality mode.

Avowed is one game where MFG isn't native to the game, but it's a good example of where the Nvidia App and its DLSS Override feature comes into play. That's where you can force the Transformer model into games without the new DLSS model enabled by default, but crucially also where you can enable MFG on practically all games that have traditional 2x Frame Generation already part of the game.

That's how I've got 4x MFG in action here, and it looks great, feels super-responsive, and the additional smoothing of MFG totally nixes any of the weird stuttery performance you could otherwise get in this game, with this card. Just please ignore the bit where I struggle to figure out how to climb a ladder. That happens to me IRL, too.

The visuals are not 100% perfect though. While the actual gameworld looks great, with nary an artifact in sight to betray those AI-generated injected frames, you will see the tell-tale signs when you look at in-game markers. Any quest markers that remain in place within your vision as you move the viewport around, have a tendency to slightly glitch out. You would have seen a similar effect in Cyberpunk 2077 with MFG enabled, too, but I didn't have those markers enabled.

It's a little jarring, for sure, but definitely something I can get past in exchange for triple-figure frame rates at 4K with this card.

So there you go, a wee snippet of what this card can do. Now, obviously this is only really representative of the sort of frame rates you'll get out of the RTX 5070 in games with the Multi Frame Generation feature available, and not how it will deal with every game when only standard rendering is available. But an increasing number of titles are launching with frame gen at launch now that all three GPU makers have their own option. So, it's not an inconsiderable sample of the big games coming out this year.

But how does it perform in real frame rate numbers, and how does it stand up against the existing competition? Well, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until our review comes out next week. And maybe even longer if you want to see how it performs against the new competition.

The GPU race is really hotting up, and this card is the first shot in the mid-range battle. It's going to be a fascinating week we've got coming up…