MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16G Ventus 3X OC Review: Near-perfect mainstream Blackwell GPU provided you can get one at $749 MSRP

Nvidia's third best Blackwell GPU this year, the RTX 5070 Ti, does not come in a Founders Edition variant, but a good number of partner cards are available, including the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC.

The RTX 5070 Ti does have a lot going for it, especially considering that it is just a cut-down GB203 GPU with the same, albeit somewhat slower, 16 GB GDDR7 memory interface. Compared to the RTX 5080 FE, you'll be losing about 10% performance with the RTX 5070 Ti — not bad considering the 25% price difference at MSRP.

Being a Ventus card, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC does not sport any bells and whistles. However, it is built well and the SFF sizing will appeal to many.

The RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC manages to pull itself ahead of the RTX 4080 Founders Edition in synthetic benchmarks, which is to be expected given the generational improvements. The uplift from the RTX 4070 Ti is pretty significant as well.

Gaming sees the gap between the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 4080 widen in pure raster performance while being a hair's breadth faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which is the current flagship from AMD's stables.

There's some confusion regarding the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16G Ventus 3X OC's pricing. According to Nvidia, this card should be getting the $749 MSRP, but MSI's website lists it at $829.99. 

In India, the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC is officially priced at ₹82,000 inclusive of taxes and comes with a three-year warranty. Expect some markups while purchasing from local retailers, though.

We now have the arrival of Nvidia's third Blackwell GPU, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Unlike the RTX 5080 and the RTX 5090, the RTX 5070 Ti does not come in a Founders Edition variant.

However, Nvidia's add-in board (AiB) partners have a variety of RTX 5070 Ti variants lined up, ranging from MSRP to custom pricing.

The RTX 5070 Ti is cut from the same GB203 die that powers the RTX 5080 but with nearly 17% fewer (8,960) CUDA cores. On the bright side, the RTX 5070 Ti offers 6% more CUDA cores than the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

The use of the GB203 GPU means that the RTX 5070 Ti shares the same 16 GB GDDR7 memory subsystem as the RTX 5080, although it operates at a slower 896 GB/s bandwidth.

For our testing, we have with us the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC. MSI's Ventus series is aimed at offering a no-frills GPU experience, and our RTX 5070 Ti sample is no exception.

We take a closer look at the RTX 5070 Ti's performance in this review, and see how the GPU fits in the current crop of cards from both Team Green and Team Red.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC measures 303 x 121 x 49 mm and weighs a portable 1.07 kg, making it a 2-slot card that finds home in many small form factor (SFF) builds.

The plastic front shroud feels sturdy, and the metal backplate offers a large cutout for effective heat dissipation.

We used the following components to evaluate the RTX 5070 Ti's performance:

• Cooler Master MasterFrame 700 open test bench
• Intel Core i9-14900K with Intel Extreme profile set in the BIOS
• Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gen4 2 TB NVMe SSD and 2x Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA SSDs for OS, benchmarks, and games
• 2x 16 GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 RAM with timings 32-39-39-80 at 1.40 V
• Aorus FO32U2P 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor
• Thermaltake TH420 V2 Ultra EX ARGB AiO cooler
• Cooler Master MVE Gold V2 1250 ATX 3.0 fully modular PSU

Windows 11 24H2 with the latest patches, together with Nvidia Game Ready Driver version 572.43 issued to the press was used.

We would like to thank Cooler Master for supplying the test bench and PSU, Gigabyte for the motherboard and monitor, Sabrent for the SSD, Thermaltake for the AiO cooler, Kingston for the DDR5 memory kit, and finally Nvidia for the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC GPU.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC is 5% faster than the RTX 4080 Founders Edition in cumulative 3DMark and Unigine tests while trailing the Radeon RX 7900 XTX by the same distance. 

The RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC is also a good 26% faster compared to the Aorus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Master. For perspective, the RTX 4070 Ti was $50 more expensive at launch back in the day.

For a 17% reduction in CUDA cores, the RTX 5070 Ti is 11% slower overall than the RTX 5080 Founders Edition in synthetic benchmarks.

Interestingly, the RTX 5070 Ti's token generation performance in MLPerf is not far from that of the RTX 5080 FE and 11% faster than the RX 7900 XTX.

The RTX 4080 FE and the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X essentially vie for the same spot in Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA and Optix workloads.

The RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX deliver comparable performance in cumulative raster gaming tests at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra settings.

However, the RX 7900 XTX sees good gains, as much as 35% in 1440p Ultra, over the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC in Alan Wake 2. The RDNA 3 flagship also has an edge in Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Overall, the RTX 5070 Ti offers a good 20% gen-on-gen gain in gaming over the RTX 4070 Ti at 4K without the use of upscaling technologies.

The RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC achieves a good 20% higher fps than the RTX 4080 FE with path tracing enabled at 1440p in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. However, the 16 GB VRAM limitation means that cranking up the resolution to 4K with path tracing results in a slideshow even with DLSS and frame generation turned on.

Other games such as Black Myth: Wukong see relatively smaller gains with the RTX 5070 Ti versus the RTX 4080 FE. 

Enabling frame generation is necessary to achieve playable frames in texture-heavy titles like Black Myth: Wukong and Alan Wake 2, especially at high ray tracing settings.