I Tested 8 AAA Games on the Nvidia RTX 5070; Here’s Why DLSS 4 is Important For This GPU

The 70-series cards from Nvidia have always been the ones most gamers actually look at when upgrading. It’s supposed to strike that middle ground — not overkill like a 5090, but not stripped down either. And for the 50-series cards, the Nvidia RTX 5070 steps into that role, bringing DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation along for the ride.

To see how it actually performs in the real world, I ran it through eight demanding titles — Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Dying Light 2, Black Myth Wukong, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars Outlaws, and Forza Horizon 5. Each game was tested at 1080p, both with DLSS 4 and Frame Generation turned on and off, and in a few cases with Multi-Frame Generation as well, to see how far the card can stretch, and what trade-offs come with it. Here’s what I found out.

Nvidia RTX 5070 Specifications and Comparison with RTX 4070

The RTX 5070 moves to Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture, replacing the Ada Lovelace foundation of the RTX 4070. On paper, it’s an incremental bump in some areas — CUDA cores rise slightly to 6144 from 5888, while clock speeds are only marginally higher.

But the real jump comes in AI performance and ray tracing: the 5070 doubles AI throughput to 988 TOPS (up from 466) and delivers 94 TFLOPS of Ray tracing performance compared to the 4070’s 67. Memory remains at 12GB, but now uses faster GDDR7 on the same 192-bit bus. Power draw has gone up to 250W from 200W.

My Test Rig

For testing, I paired the RTX 5070 with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X, running on an MSI X670E Gaming Plus WiFi motherboard and 48GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 5400MT/s. Storage was handled by a WD Black SN8100 Gen5 NVMe SSD (2TB), and power came from an Antec NE1000G 1000W PSU. The games were tested on an MSI G274F monitor with a 180Hz refresh rate. The GPU driver version used was 581.15, the latest available at the time of testing.

This setup is comfortably high-end, ensuring the RTX 5070 was the clear focus in every benchmark. So if you’re running anything comparable, the numbers here should translate pretty closely to your own experience.

Nvidia RTX 5070 Performance in 8 Games

At 1080p, the RTX 5070 showed it has enough raw power to handle modern games, but it also made clear how much the AI trickeries matter for the card. On native runs, Dying Light 2 averaged 183fps, Horizon Zero Dawn sat at 175fps, and Black Myth Wukong managed 76fps even with ray tracing set to Very High. Cyberpunk 2077, with the graphics preset at High and ray-traced lighting set to Medium, was a different story at just 54 fps.

Turning on DLSS 4 and Frame Generation (2x) changed that picture. Cyberpunk climbed to 133fps, a 146.3% uplift over native. Black Myth Wukong rose to 131fps, a 72.4% gain, while Dying Light 2 went from 183fps to 262fps, a 43.2% increase. That 183 fps baseline is already impressive on its own, primarily considering ray tracing was enabled in this run.

Every game in this test, except Star Wars Outlaws, comes with a built-in benchmark. With RTX Direct Lighting, Ray Reconstruction, and other advanced effects, it made it tough to skip. I tested it by roaming through a busy area packed with reflective surfaces and plenty of NPCs, a section that stresses lighting and performance in a way that mirrors actual gameplay. In the native run, it returned 72fps, which was then pushed to 138fps with DLSS and Frame Generation, but Ray Reconstruction was still enabled here. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, tested on Ultra High, moved from 68 fps without DLSS and Frame Gen to 122fps with it. Horizon Zero Dawn, on the other hand, somehow did not benefit at all from these trickeries. Instead, it came up with 175fps with everything turned off, which is 2fps more than the DLSS run.

In Black Myth, the 5th-percentile lows rose from 64fps to 112fps with DLSS, which directly translates into smoother gameplay without the dips that cause stutter. GPU utilisation was consistently high in most titles, typically 95–98%, with VRAM usage hovering between 8GB and 11GB depending on the game — enough to show that the 5070 is being fully stretched even at 1080p. Cyberpunk 2077, meanwhile, was the opposite: GPU usage dipped to around 67% while CPU usage climbed to about 50% during DLSS runs.

I also ran Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws on Ultra presets to see if the performance dip is too drastic. The former, with the preset set to Ray Tracing Ultra with DLSS (Frame Gen disabled per preset), averaged 55 fps, almost identical to its native result, while using just over 8GB of VRAM. Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, at Ultra delivered 128 fps with DLSS, about 10 fps lower than its High-quality run. I also gave multi-frame generation a try on Outlaws, with it set to 4x. The game returned 238fps, but with a few artefacts like noise around the edges.

In the end, the RTX 5070 has 1080p gaming well covered, and 1440p should also be comfortably within reach. But push demanding titles like Black Myth: Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077 to higher settings, and it becomes clear that upscaling is essential. At 4K, DLSS 4 and Frame Generation won’t be optional for acceptable frames. A full review is on the way, where I’ll be testing it head-to-head against the RTX 5070 Ti and AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and 7900 XTX.