I'm upgrading from 1080p to 1440p and looking for a very affordable graphics card, ideally around £80 or less. I'm considering a used GTX 1070 because it has more VRAM than my current GTX 1650, but I'm not sure whether it would handle 1440p well. I mainly play a variety of games, including AAA titles, and I'd be willing to use upscaling if necessary. My system has a Gigabyte B760M D3HP DDR4 motherboard, an i3-12100F, 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, an MSI MAG A750GL PCIe 5 power supply, a GTX 1650 4GB, a 128GB SATA SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. Would a GTX 1070 be a worthwhile upgrade for 1440p?
3 Answers
For games released before roughly 2020, a GTX 1070 can still provide a decent 1440p experience with sensible settings. Modern games are a different story, especially when their minimum GPU recommendations are already around the RTX 3050 level or higher.
The extra VRAM isn’t the main issue. The GTX 1070’s architecture and overall performance are aging, so newer games may run poorly even if they technically launch. Upscaling can help somewhat, but it won’t turn the card into a comfortable modern AAA 1440p GPU; you’d likely need very low settings and modest frame rates.
Yes, a GTX 1070 can output and play games at 1440p, but the experience depends heavily on the title. Older games and less demanding competitive or indie games should run reasonably well, while newer AAA games will require low settings and may only reach around 45 FPS or less.
So it’s technically capable, but not really a dependable 1440p card for modern games.