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.

As We Hear It: Audiophile hype vs. reality? GPU chatter (nVidia Blackwell RTX 50XX-series), thoughts on AI frame-generation ("fake frames"), gaming, and art as imagination.

I hope you're all doing well as we enter the year. It's rather amazing that the first quarter of the 21st Century has passed so quickly! Time flew. I do hope that as time passes, audiophiles worldwide are gradually becoming more knowledgeable about the science behind this stuff and in general much more critical thinkers, more resilient to the snake oil and scams of yesteryear. I simply think that this is part of the evolution that must happen for any hobby in order to not stagnate. If something is contentious or seems "too good to be true" based on conventional knowledge as we all become versed in how audio reproduction works, the product very well could be something to avoid; instead, better to save money and look for something more meaningful to purchase.

As per my usual routine, every once awhile I'll publish an E-mail or two from readers of the blog and take time to discuss matters brought up that might not have been fully covered previously, often hitting other short discussion items that don't need a full-length post.

Let's have a look at this E-mail from Michael in Sweden:

Game PC Update: nVidia RTX 4070 Super GPU. That "game console vs. PC" debate; twilight of the consoles? Upcoming RTX 50XX GPUs. And graphical diminishing returns in the Art of Gaming.

I know, that's a massive title! But sometimes there's a bunch of stuff to talk/think about before the holidays. 🙂

With recent holiday sales, like I did recently with the Server, I thought it was time to finally update that GPU in my GAMING rig. Although I had updated the CPU last year to the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X (~US$150) 8-core processor, I was still playing with the old-skool nVidia GTX 1080 GPU that I got back in 2017. 

Clearly, after 7 years and a few generations, it was time to get a modern gaming GPU; yeah I have the RTX 4090 but that's for the workstation rather than gaming, in fact, I haven't even installed a single game on this workstation!

As you can see, I got the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Super Evo OC Dual-fan model, currently ~US$600 (~CAD$800). The RTX 4070 Super variant was released in January 2024, not long ago and I figured would make for a good contemporary card with longevity for upcoming games and should last me into the 2030's. It's equipped with 12GB of GDDR6X which should be adequate for awhile. And because it's the dual-fan model, it's not as long as the 3-fan cards; this is important because the enclosure I'm using has a limit to the length of large graphics cards it can accommodate.

MUSINGS: nVidia's GeForce RTX 4090. Power Limited Overclock settings. On technological progress into cognitive domains.

For this post, I thought I'd explore technological progress in the computing space. While I speak mainly about audio topics in these pages, I hope this post gives you an idea of the broader technological progress happening around us.

As per the image above, I've updated my workstation graphics card to a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming OC. This card is truly a beast, covering 3.5 slots in the computer thanks to the extra vapor cooling chamber. [Related to this card is the slimmer Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 WindForce V2 that "just" takes up 3 slots.]

Years ago in 2017, I spoke about my GTX 1080 used in the game machine of that time. Since then, it's obvious that technology has moved forward very substantially! Every couple years has seen a new generation of graphics cards churned out by nVidia typically with AMD following suit and these days Intel making headway with their more budget-friendly ARC line.

With each iteration, we're seeing objective improvements in computational ability and physical characteristics like the shrinkage of the transistor "process" from 16nm for the GTX 1080 down to the 5nm (near limits of silicon) in the RTX 4090 today. With the ability to fit more transistors into a smaller area (higher density), the number of parallel computational cores has increased from 2560 shading cores (also known as CUDA cores) in the GTX 1080 to 16384 units in the RTX 4090, a 6.4x increase in this one metric alone; not to mention the addition of new features like the Tensor cores (high speed, mixed precision, high-dimensional matrix multiplications) released in the RTX 20*0 generation, important in deep-learning tasks.