Black Magic!

The Agony and Ecstasy of Testing Blackwell,

 Nvidia's Wallet-Busting New Graphics Card. 

 

  Pirate Press             August 2025 

 

Way back in 2013, I admitted that my purchase of a new video card was solely driven by reports that Crysis 3 would "melt my PC" with its demanding requirements. Twelve years later, nothing has changed and I'm unashamed to admit that I'm shallow and still primarily enjoy video games because of the immersive visuals. In computer gaming circles, I identify as a "Eye Candy Whore" and it's an expensive hobby to say the least. And with 2025 featuring the best lineup of new Triple-A titles in recent memory, I knew my addiction was going to be very costly. 

 

Typically, I try to maximize my video card purchases by only selecting every other generation (i.e. investing in the 3000-series but skipping the 4000 to focus on the 5000.) This not only saves money and is more efficient but also ensures that the technology gains are much more pronounced. For instance, the 4000 card might just offer a marginal increase of 25% whereas the 5000 model can be 50% or greater. Additionally, contemporary features are constantly being introduced with each new generation so buyers are getting more than just a minor frame-rate increase. (See DLSS 4 and MFG below.) 

 

Unfortunately, even five years later we're continuing to deal with the economic hangover from Covid so high-end graphics cards are still nearly impossible to get. A Christmas miracle allowed me to get my 3080 in December 2020 and it's successor, the 4080 was released in November 2022. At that time, I naively believed that when the 5080 went on sale in a couple years that all availability issues would have conveniently evaporated. 

 

Needless to say, my naive optimism was sorely misplaced and not only were very few 5080s available when they debuted earlier this year, but thanks to scumbag scalpers they all possessed ridiculous markups. 

 

Patience has never been my strong suit yet despite that I still tried to bide my time in hopes that supply might actually catch up with demand. The 5080 dropped on January 30th so I still had almost four months before Doom was going to be available on May 15th.

 

As expected, those frustrating few months flew by and I was no closer to procuring a 5080 than I was to winning the Powerball lottery. But, two days before Doom was to be released I received an unusual email that was either a blessing or a curse. Amanda would probably consider it a malediction since it drained our bank account of $1000 but I was honestly elated at the opportunity. Essentially, I had been visiting all the big electronics sites (Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, etc.) in hopes of securing a 5080 but had come up empty handed. This obviously didn't go unnoticed at Newegg who sent the email, offering me "Exclusive early item access for a returning customer" to their newest batch of unreleased high-end graphics cards. Funny enough, the last item I bought from them was a $16 keyboard back in 2022. But in 2020, I spent $1200 on components for my new computer so I think that's the kind of payday they were hoping to recreate. I don't know if that tempting email was generated by a man or machine, but it was literally the answer to my prayers! 

 

Now, the official MSRP for the 5080 is $999 but the cheapest one available was a whopping $1389. Even crazier, the 5090 at $2899 was almost sold out! So, I did some quick math and pulled the trigger on a 5070 Ti for $899. I wasn't going to pay $500 dollars more for a 5080 when it's only 10-15% faster and has the same 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM.  

 

But adding insult to injury, I still ended up paying an additional $65 in tax and then they had the nerve to charge me $20 for shipping bringing the grand total precariously close to breaking the four-digit barrier. Back in 2017, I'd never paid more than $399 for a top-tier graphics card and I was mortified at having to spend $699 for the new 1080 Ti, swearing I'd never do that again. Despite my best intentions we all see how well that went so I also paid the $3 bribery charge for "Rush Processing" on my 5070. After all, what's a couple more bucks gonna matter in that Pile O' Cash and it did ensure that it shipped the same day.  

 

 

  

Of course, the MSRP on the standard 5070 Ti is $749 but the AIB vendors get around this by adding more fans and slightly upping the memory speeds. This affords them the excuse to raise the price $150 or more for a small 7% increase in performance. Worse yet, the premium on my card didn't even include any flashy RGB lights or other eye-catching items differentiating if from the slower 12GB 5070. But while it didn't look any faster, the bump in clock speed on my custom 5070 Ti did help it erode some of the slight performance advantage held by the pricier 5080.  

 

 

      

FIGURES DON'T LIE BUT LIARS FIGURE

 

And just as Matt Bowers was the central antagonist in my previous article, Jensen Huang is in the spotlight for this one. Huang is the Taiwanese-born founder of Nvidia, which has seen an A.I.-fueled meteoric rise in the past few years. Recently, Nvidia's market capitalization reached $4 Trillion helping it to become the first public company in history to achieve that milestone. Huang's personal net worth is $117 billion, he lives in a $38 million mansion in San Francisco and proving that money doesn't buy class, he is fond of wearing a $9000 Tom Ford lizard-skin leather jacket which clearly pairs well with his reptilian DNA.  

Top Secret photo of Jensen Huang without his AI-generated Homo Sapiens Disguise. 

(Source: Area 51) 

 

Early on, Huang foolishly gambled the fate of the company by insisting on Quadrilateral Primitives for it's first graphics accelerator instead of the Triangle Primitives embraced by the rest of the industry. This hubristic move backfired spectacularly and Nvidia was just 30 days away from going out of business when Sega bailed them out with a $5 million investment. It kept them afloat long enough for Huang to reverse direction and bring the Riva 128 to market in 1997 which saved the company. 

 

Interestingly, at that particular time 3dfx was dominating the graphics industry with it's Voodoo 3D accelerator card. The Voodoo products featured better image quality and performance than Nvidia's offerings and my first discrete graphics card was a 4MB Diamond Monster 3D which Amanda bought me for Christmas in 1997. 

 

However, Huang wasn't content with second-place and he worked feverishly on a contender that could dethrone the Voodoo cards. His response was the Riva TNT which marked the beginning of the end for 3dfx's supremacy. In 2000, I upgraded to a Voodoo 3 card with a whopping 16 MB of VRAM, four times the amount of my original Voodoo card. Despite that, vendors were increasingly adopting Nvidia and when Windows XP debuted in the fall of 2001, it did not include native support for 3dfx's Glide API which sealed it's fate. As such, I quickly pivoted to my first Nvidia card, a Visiontek GeForce 3 Ti 200 during a Black Friday sale at Best Buy. It remains the first and last BF sale I've attended as well as the singular best deal ever on a video card. Normally priced $199, it had a $100 instant rebate so I effectively got it for $100. 

                 

A black and white scan of the ad from an era when people still bought newspapers. 

 

And aside from two moments of indiscretion in 2003 and 2010 when I supported ATI, I've always been loyal to Nvidia. Simply put, they offer the best performance and stability despite Huang's lack of business ethics and his insatiable appetite for company profits. 

 

Although Huang's employed a lot of unscrupulous tactics over the years to keep Nvidia on top, his latest morally ambiguous action surrounds the release of the 5060 graphics card. Many outlets stepped forward to point out that Huang "manipulated the review process by withholding drivers, selectively granting early access to favorable outlets, and pressuring reviewers to paint the card in a positive light." This was primarily due to the negative response generated last year by the 4060 as well as the fact that the 5060 was limited to just 8GB VRAM and was only negligibly faster than its fore bearer. 

 

For years, Nvidia has not really had any competition in the video card space so there's been no compelling reason for Huang to reduce prices or pull out all the stops. He's been content to raise prices as he sees fit and artificially limit availability and performance to fit the niche each card fills. A prime example of this was my 1080 Ti possessing 11GB VRAM while my newer and more expensive 3080 only had 10GB.

 

So until AMD or Intel can produce a line of graphics cards that break Huang's stranglehold on the market, he'll continue to begrudgingly engineer models that are only mildly better than their predecessors.  Despite skipping a generation, this is particularly evident in the graph below. Tensor Cores and Ray Tracing Cores have barely increased while the Bus Width has shrunk, all ways of unnaturally hindering the performance so customers desiring more will have to step up to the 5080 and pay a 50% premium. However, one desirable side effect of the new architecture is more efficiency resulting in a card that draws less power and runs cooler and quieter.               

 

	NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti	NVIDIA RTX 3080
TRANSISTORS	45.6 billion	28.3 billion
TENSOR CORES	280	272
RAY TRACING CORES	70	68
CORE CLOCK	2497 MHz	1800 MHz
MEMORY	GDDR7	GDDR6
BUS WIDTH	256-bit	320-bit
FRAME BUFFER	16 GB	10 GB
MAX TDP	300 watts	320 watts
MFG PROCESS	TSMC 4 nm	Samsung 8 nm
PRICE PAID	$985.34	$863.77 (2020)

   

An obvious fan of hyperbole, Huang enthusiastically gloated at the 5070's introduction that the $549 card was as fast as their last generation flagship, the 4090, which is presently selling online for $3000. Of course, he's technically correct but there's a big asterisk beside that bold claim with some intentionally murky details. 

 

This "Video Voodoo" is courtesy of Nvidia's groundbreaking new tech dubbed "Multi Frame Generation." Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTX) is an immersive effect in gaming that creates photo-realistic visuals but is immensely challenging. MFG steps in and interpolates the frames, generating 3 AI frames for every hardware rendered frame, preternaturally boosting output from 60 fps to 240 fps. So, yes, in theory a 5070 can churn out frames as fast as a 4090 but it's not a true apples-to-apples comparison. 

 

DOOMSDAY 

 

Typically, I'm against this type of software "smoke & mirrors" but there was no denying that the new Doom would definitely push my 5070 Ti to its limit. Doom is also the first game that requires a Ray Tracing-capable video card meaning the minimum spec is a 8GB 2060 Super. Naturally, this forced compliance was met with a lot of opposition as it's been reported on the May 2025 Steam hardware survey that of their 70 million active users less than half meet this criteria. In fact, the most popular GPU is a 3060 with 4.56% adoption rate and my 5070 Ti accounts for a meager 0.37%. 

 

Fortunately, right after I purchased my 5070 Ti Nvidia announced a limited promotion whereby anyone who bought a 5070, 5080 or 5090 was eligible for a free copy of the Doom Premium Edition which is a $100 value. 

 

 

However, unlike previous giveaways this time the game was tied to the graphics card so that it could only be activated thru the Nvidia app on a computer with one of the aforementioned 50-series cards. This is quite a draconian move to prevent owners reselling the game and is the latest example of how we don't even own the software that we buy. In fact, I had originally toyed with the idea of selling my own individual code for around $50 since I already had Doom under my Microsoft Game Pass account.

 

But upon learning of the new hardware restriction and realizing I would be missing out on the upcoming DLC (a $50+ value) convinced me to keep it. Yet, when I attempted to redeem the code I kept getting denied with a bizarre Nvidia error code. Some research turned up an issue with the authentication servers and advised me to disable IPv6 although that didn't work either. With my redemption expiration window down to just one week left, I tried it again and successfully got it added to my Steam library although I didn't download it or install it. That notwithstanding, it somehow must have conflicted with the full Game Pass version I was playing because it began intermittently crashing. The solution was to completely uninstall the GP version (thereby forfeiting my 12-15 hours of progress) and download the 100GB game again from Steam. With that, Doom holds the distasteful distinction of being the only game I've ever had to download twice within the first week of release. 

 

Hades is actually quite beautiful.

The Dark Ages is the best-looking PC game ever.

 

Regrettably, the first major update (which included a built-in benchmark and full Path Tracing) did not arrive until one month after the game's release, thereby depriving me of the ability to test it on my old 3080 as it had already been sold. Instead, I had to settle for the fps I observed while gaming. 

 

 

And just when I thought Doom couldn't get any more demanding, they released the Full Path Tracing update for it. Nvidia pronounces Path Tracing as "the most important visual technology of our time" and goes on to describe it as "photorealistic 3D environments filled with dynamic light and shadow, reflections and refractions." In layman's terms, it makes everything super shiny but the cost in GPU cycles is tremendous. You may recall that back in 2021, Path Tracing was added to Quake II, a 25 year-old PC game and it instantly crippled my then-new 3080 graphics card.  It averaged 39 fps and even with my new 5070 Ti I was only able to crack 61 fps illustrating just how brutal Path Tracing can be. 

 

Complicating matters, Nvidia usually centers new video card drivers around major releases and Doom was no different. However, version 576.80 of the "Game Ready" drivers dropped the same time as Doom's first big update so I quickly installed them thinking they were necessary. Naturally, the Path Tracing was ruthless but I noticed even after turning it off that the game was still terribly sluggish. I triple-checked all the settings and was quite upset that even after reinstalling it that it was basically unplayable. Of course, I could find no evidence that anyone else was having similar issues and was starting to fear that my pricey new card was faulty. After all, overheating issues and melted pin connectors have been a very real issue as the video card's complexity and power requirements have increased with every new generation. In sheer desperation, I rolled back the brand-new Nvidia drivers to version 576.40 which launched with Doom a month earlier and that turned out to be the problem. Performance was mercifully restored but I was still left puzzled by the culprit as it's clearly been a decade or more since I had a similar issue with bad drivers.  

 

As you can see below, Path Tracing primarily improves the reflections so that the flames are more accurately represented on the ground and in the roof's structure. Yes, it's dazzling but certainly not worth it to me when it literally cuts the frame-rate in half, say from 100 fps to 50 fps. Also, even with the detail enabled it's hard to appreciate it when you're crashing into a room surrounded by demons with half a dozen explosions and other assorted mayhem transpiring.   

 

Source: Nvidia
 

Furthermore, forthcoming games like Borderlands 4 (scheduled for release in September) will also only get more demanding as it's been reported that just a third of current users are equipped to handle its suggested configuration. 

 

 

As noted above, a 12GB GPU would have even excluded my 3080 and this is shocking as Borderlands has historically been on the less-intensive side. But it's not an outlier either, as the new Robocop: Unfinished Business is similarly taxing. Despite being a budget title from Nacon, it uses the Unreal Engine 5 to great effect as even a 5090 only hits 85 fps natively at 4K with Epic Settings.       

So, without further ado here are the benchmarks justifying the investment in the 5070 Ti: 

 

 

BENCHMARKS 

 

Dawntrail: Dawntrail is the latest benchmark from Final Fantasy XIV and as with previous benchmarks, it's a compendium of highly-animated action scenes from the game. While clearly not as sophisticated (or demanding) as the new Doom, it does replace all of the game's texture assets with ones designed for a "physically-based rendering" (PBR) paradigm. That means it's a lighting method that uses pre-defined physical properties of object materials to calculate object shading and surface specularity, including reflections. At 4K, the 5070 Ti is roughly 30% faster than the 3080. 

 

 

 

DLSS Feature Test: 3DMark's DLSS test is a bleeding-edge gauntlet that fully leverages the power of the 5000-series by utilizing it's exclusive DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation technology (MFG). The Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) software employs Nvidia's extensive neural network to extract multidimensional features of the rendered scene and intelligently combine details from multiple frames into a high-resolution final image. This approach allows the 5070 Ti to need fewer samples for rendering and uses AI to fill in the information to create the end result. It generates a clear, crisp image similar to traditional rendering but without all the performance-robbing overhead. The 3080 struggled to hit 46 fps but the 5070 Ti achieved 201.37 fps, a new all-time record.       

 

 

Doom: The Dark Ages: Although this title also takes advantage of all the 5070's capabilities, I tried to standardize the benchmarks as much as possible. Doom utilizes DLSS by default, but I did not enable MFG or Path Tracing since the 3080 can't use it. As such, I wanted this to purely showcase the evolutionary improvements of the GB203 chipset versus the GA102. It was pretty impressive too as the 5070 was 150% faster, pulling down 65 fps to the 3080's 25 fps at 4K with Ultra Nightmare settings. Flipping on MFG would have swelled the frame rate to 200 which just really felt like cheating!    

 

  

GRID: Legends: This 2 year-old software is the most underrated racing game I've ever played, and I stumbled upon it by accident while browsing the free games available on Microsoft's Game Pass. While nearly a perfect example of great graphics and car physics, it sadly doesn't offer any support for advanced features like Ray Tracing or DLSS. As such, the delta is the slimmest here with the 5070 ahead by just 22%. When a five year-old 3080 is able to hit 120+ fps at 4K, a 5070 Ti is just a total waste for this game.      

 

 

Neon Noir The last Crysis game came out in 2013, but developer Crytek still knows how to craft a killer game engine as evidenced by the Neon Noir benchmark. Built on CRYENGINE 5.5, the stunning visuals are achieved via a universally-supported Ray Tracing technology that's flexible enough to run even on non-RT video cards, although presumably not very well. With no DLSS or MFG to upscale the frames, it comes down to just pure GPU muscle to push the pixels. My 3080 couldn't break 60 fps, but the 5070 Ti managed 100 fps, with a benchmark score of 8499 to 5930.    

 

 

Raytracing Feature Test: As the name implies, this was very similar to Neon Noir with results to match. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass. The Camera rays are mapped across the field of view with small random offsets to simulate a depth of field effect and then the frame rate is determined by the time taken to map and shade each pixel. The 3080 hit 46.43 fps and the 5070 almost doubled that to 83.72 fps. 

 

 

 

Steel Nomad: Fittingly, the final benchmark doesn't engage any cutting edge technologies but rather relies on total rasterized GPU performance just as you might find in any standard video game. However, the complexity is increased via several techniques like procedurally-generated vegetation and volumetric skies that not only look beautiful but also test the limits of the hardware. At 4K, the 3080 generated 45.16 fps and the 5070 managed just 67.79 fps, the lowest score in any of the benchmarks. 

 

  

CONCLUSION 

For today's present crop of video cards, the hard truth is that Path Tracing is currently at the point that Ray Tracing was in 2019. That is, in its infancy and not quite ready for prime time. Back then, RT was so taxing that I didn't even bother using it, a very similar scenario to what we're seeing now with Path Tracing. But, I suspect that by the debut of the 7000 series we'll have the necessary silicon to fully enable Path Tracing without such a punitive drop in frame rates. However, more and more games are embracing 8K resolution so that will push the frames back down again and restart the vicious cycle. 

 

Owning a 5070 Ti is a mixed bag; It's ridiculously expensive, only a few new games fully support it and it's blistering performance is (mostly) useless on older games.    

 

If my current track record is any indicator for my next graphics card, I'd better start saving my pennies now!