Just $10 separates these two great graphics cards, so which one is worth splashing out $500 on? Well, the good news is that no matter which one you go with, you're getting the latest generation of GPU from AMD and Nvidia, both packed with all the features you expect in a modern graphics card.
The cheaper of the two is Gigabyte's take on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. It has higher clocks than the reference design (2,565 vs 2,475 MHz) but a 4% overclock is barely going to be noticeable in games. It sports a pretty large heatsink and cooler, so you'll need to make sure you've got plenty of room inside your PC case for it.
Rather than using the 12VHPWR power connector that many RTX 40-series cards sport, Gigabyte has fitted a standard 8-pin PCIe connector, which means you won't need to use adapter cables if you're upgrading from an older GPU. Ada Lovelace chips are also very power efficient, so you won't need to buy a new power supply unit unless it's a very old and basic one.
With excellent ray tracing capabilities, plus full support for every DLSS 3.5 feature (AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising), it'll power through any game you care to throw at it. The RTX 4070 can handle 1080p and 1440p gaming with ease and, depending on what settings you use, it'll manage 4K too.
Acer's Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) is a graphics card that uses the same GPU as in the mighty Radeon RX 7900 XTX, though lots of shaders have been disabled, along with a few memory-cache chiplets. It's still a very potent graphics card, though, and is generally faster than the RTX 4070 in most games.
- We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
When ray tracing is involved, however, the performance lead swings back in favor of Nvidia's mid-range model and despite AMD's work on improving its shader-based FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation algorithms, they're not quite as good as Nvidia's DLSS. In some games, you can barely tell the difference but in others, FSR offers plenty of performance gains but at a cost of visual fidelity.
AMD's RDNA 3 processors aren't quite as energy efficient as RTX 40-series ones either, and the RX 7900 GRE will consume up to 60 W more than the RTX 4070. Offsetting this a little is the fact that Acer's Nitro model boasts a 7% overclock, compared to the reference design.
At launch, the RTX 4070 had an MSRP of $599 but now that it's been superseded by the RTX 4070 Super (pun not intended), prices have come down and we're now at the stage where we get this kind of deal. The RX 7900 GRE hasn't been replaced by anything just yet but it's still great to see a healthy chunk being sliced off the price tag.
Yes, $500 is a lot of money to spend on 'just' a graphics card but these are both very capable pixel pushers. If you've not upgraded your GPU for a few years, you're going to be shocked by just how powerful they are.
