nVidia RTX 5070 Ti GPU - a look at the lowest-priced version. And imagine, relinquishing "lossless" orthodoxy.

Hey everyone, as usual, every once awhile I'll look at other tech than audiophile stuff. In late 2024, I wrote about the nVidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super GPU and mentioned in that article about the upcoming RTX 5070 Ti and some of the expectations I had about this interesting card in comparison to the previous generation. Well, now in 2025, the new generation is here and as you can see above, I've got one to test out.

The box above is the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Windforce SFF 16GB model which is probably the lowest-priced "MSRP" version of this class of cards; I got one of these at a local dealer. This is similar to the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Windforce SFF OC (Canada) I see available online at places like Amazon but you'd save some money with a non-OC model if you can find it. (As usual, check out other brands like MSI, ASUS, Zotac, PNY for comparisons and relative deals.)

The only difference between OC and non-OC that I can tell for the Gigabyte Windforce is that this card is obviously not pre-overclock from the factory and I believe software like Afterburner power limits at 100% instead of 110%. Since I really have no desire to overclock GPUs (if anything, I do the "Power Limited Overclock" thing by pushing up GPU/Memory clocks but lower the power limit), I'm willing to stick with stock speed and tweak if I have the inclination.

MUSINGS: 4K UHD TV, HFR, 3D, HDR, etc... Thoughts on video technology and the consumer.

As you saw a couple weeks back, when in China, I visited a number of electronics stores, especially the "big box" places in Beijing and Guangzhou. Many of these stores had on display a whole floor of 4K TVs made by all kinds of brands (many local China brands like TCL, Hisense, Skyworth, Changhong as well as the usual Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony, etc...) and one could easily walk around and compare image quality. Of course, this is ultimately a limited comparison because the TVs are all displaying the manufacturer default settings and this usually means extremely bright, color saturated, extreme sharpness, and max'ed out contrast settings playing typically pristine demo videos so as to catch the consumer's gaze.

Even though this is primarily an audio blog, I see no need to confine ourselves to just one sensory modality... I've been wanting to upgrade to a 4K TV for awhile, certainly since my 4K computer monitor upgrade early last year. For today, I thought it would be good to think about the world of TVs and where the home visual technologies are leading us. Let's talk about some of the technology around visual quality and the parameters we should be keeping in mind, and perhaps even consider the future and what's down the pipeline. Perhaps most importantly, I like to think as a consumer in the big picture and even speculate a little bit about what might happen down the road.