With the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, the next GPU in line (in order of release) is the RTX 5070, which is set to hit shelves on March 5th (unless rumors of a potential delay to mid-March turn out to be true). And as we get closer to the release date, benchmark scores are starting to show up for the upcoming GPU. Typically, these benchmarks appear a week or two before launch, and while the scores should be taken with a grain of salt, they are a good indicator that reviewers have started testing.

That said, the benchmark comes from an unknown reviewer who tested the RTX 5070 on a 9800X3D CPU & X870E motherboard system, with memory specs oddly showing 4000 MT/s. This is either an error, a misconfiguration, or something not recognized correctly by the Geekbench software. As for the results, let's just say they were quite revealing, especially for those still on the RTX 30 series.

Slower than the RTX 5070 Ti, barely ahead of the RTX 3090

The RTX 5070 was tested in both Vulkan and OpenCL, scoring 188,712 and 187,414 points, respectively. Comparing these alleged RTX 5070 scores with the RTX 5070 Ti, which scores 236,850 points in Vulkan and 240,750 in OpenCL, we see around 20% performance loss compared to the Ti version. This was to be expected.

But how does that compare to a former flagship model? Well, while Nvidia claims the RTX 5070 offers similar performance to the RTX 4090, this isn’t the case when comparing pure rasterization. The 50 series card makes the most of DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, but without the help of AI it sits closer to the RTX 3090.

Looking at scores for the RTX 3090 on Geekbench (OpenCL and Vulkan), the GPU has a Vulkan score of 179,816 and an OpenCL score of 193,377. This puts the RTX 5070 close in performance to a GPU two generations older, one that was later replaced as the flagship by the more powerful RTX 3090 Ti.

Raw performance isn’t a massive improvement

The RTX 5070 isn’t the only GPU showing poor raw performance in the RTX 50 series. In fact, we recently saw benchmarks from TechPowerUp where the RTX 5070 Ti was outperformed by last-gen GPUs like the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX. Now, with the RTX 5070 barely catching up to the RTX 3090, it's clear that the massive gains we used to see between generations are not to be expected this time.

With that said, another interesting set of benchmark scores appeared for the Red Team’s unreleased AMD RX 9070 XT, where the GPU scored 177,395 in Vulkan and 179,178 in OpenCL. This puts AMD’s upcoming Radeon card behind the RTX 5070, which is surprising since rumors and previously leaked benchmarks have shown the 9070 XT performing as well as, or even better than, the RTX 4080 Super. So once again, we'd suggest not taking these values too seriously, as nothing can be confirmed until both of these GPUs are officially released.

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.