This review contains spoilers for season 3, episode 5 of Invincible, “This Was Supposed to Be Easy.”

Less plot-centric than what we saw from Invincible last week, “This Was Supposed to Be Easy” may not strike the deft balance of early season 3, but it proves beyond a doubt that the show is at its strongest when it focuses on character. Even when it falters by (once again) splitting its attention between too many different threads, episode 5 takes its time where it matters, and lets the story’s themes play out in subtle ways that don’t demand exposition.

Todd Williams subs in for Mahershala Ali as local crime boss and supervillain Titan, who hasn’t been a major presence since his reluctant team up with Mark/Invincible in season 1. Among the most complex of the show’s baddies, he exists in a gray area that challenges Mark’s increasingly black-and-white beliefs. We see Titan without his rock-hard exoskeleton for much of the episode, spending time with his daughter while overseeing his largely reformed neighborhood. But the crime syndicate to which he reluctantly belongs – the Order, led by Machine Head and a relative newcomer, the metal-jawed, dragon-in-human form Mr. Liu – looms over his carefully-constructed domestic bliss.

Numerous dangling subplots collide when Multi-Paul finally re-enters the spotlight and tries (but fails) to stage a prison breakout, which sets off a domino effect on multiple fronts. On one hand, as Eve and Mark toy with the idea of getting their own place, they offer the prison their services as superheroes-on-call (for a retainer, of course) should another super-breakout occur. On another, Liu wants his right-hand-man Multi-Paul back and blackmails Titan into breaking him out, which leads to the local mafioso and Mark crossing paths once again. Mark, who’s been convinced all this season that “bad guys” belong in jail, is forced to confront the reality that Titan is an economic Band-Aid over his poor enclave (the alternate, an Order-installed crime lord, would be worse), leading to the superhero having to compromise on his stern beliefs for the first time in a while.

This refreshing result goes hand-in-hand with the question of whether Mark will leave the nest, and leave Debbie to raise Oliver – her adopted, purple-skinned, half-alien son – on her own, or whether Eve will become part of the family. One evening, when Oliver seemingly goes missing – upsetting an already fragile family dynamic, not unlike in Titan’s story – Mark and Eve rush to find him. However, in a surprise turn, they track Oliver down only to discover him being a regular, mischievous kid at the skate-park, fooling around with friends and dealing with bullies without resorting to excessive violence. It’s mildly irksome to see such a major arc was resolved off-screen – Oliver killing the Mauler Twins and seeming intent on killing more bad guys was a significant deal – but in viewing each outcome this week as though it protrudes from Mark’s shifting morality, it works like a charm.

Like last week, the action is steeped in characters cooperating, with their respective powers working in tandem, speaking to their evolving dynamic (remember Nolan and Allen tag-teaming a Viltrumite?). Namely: Eve conceals herself in a pink energy army and has Mark swing her around like a medieval mace to take down Liu’s dragon form. They work phenomenally well as a superhero couple (at least for the time being), and while the “who’s who” and “why” of the Order’s schemes don’t really amount to much, the interpersonal development between the show’s characters strikes a major chord.

Elsewhere in “This Was Supposed to Be Easy”: Rex cooks Rae dinner… Man, the show needs to figure out how to either better flesh out its B-plots, or forget them altogether!

Funko has started off the year strong with quite a few different figures to preorder. If you’re a Batman fan, a few characters from Batman: The Animated Series are set to get their own figures next. Harley Quinn, The Riddler, and Ra’s al Ghul are all available to preorder for $12.99 a piece while a fun deluxe figure of Batman is available for $29.99. They’re all set to release on May 23. Head to the links below so you can secure your favorite figures for your collectible collection.

Preorder Batman: The Animated Series Funko Pops

When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 came out, it offered a lackluster generational improvement over the RTX 4090 at a much higher price. And while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti still isn’t much faster than its last-gen counterpart, it is more affordable, making it the most reasonable Blackwell graphics card to actually buy, especially if you don’t have unlimited cash to burn.

At its base price of $749, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is an excellent 4K graphics card that all but pushes the more expensive RTX 5080 out of the picture. However, I have to be up front about something: the RTX 5070 Ti I received for review is an aftermarket model from MSI that’s much more expensive – $1,099 – which is more expensive than the $999 RTX 5080 – assuming you can find either of these graphics cards at their actual retail price. If you can find an RTX 5070 Ti at $749, though, it is probably the best graphics card for most people, especially if you have 4K gaming on your bucket list.

Specs and Features

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the third graphics card built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture. While this architecture was initially designed for the supercomputers that run popular AI models like ChatGPT, Nvidia has ported it down into its new generation of gaming GPUs, while still retaining a lot of the AI focus.

This graphics card is based on the same GB203 GPU as the RTX 5080, just with 14 of the streaming multiprocessors (SM) disabled. That means the RTX 5070 Ti has 70 SMs, for a total of 8,960 CUDA cores, 70 RT cores and 280 Tensor Cores. Also like the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 has 16GB of GDDR7 RAM, though it is a bit slower. The Tensor Cores are the star of the show, however. Because while the CUDA cores in the RTX 5070 Ti are certainly more powerful than their equivalent in the RTX 4070 Ti, Nvidia is banking on AI upscaling and frame generation to really push this graphics card over the edge.

This time around, though, the Tensor Cores aren’t on their own, with Blackwell now including a new AI Management Processor, or AMP, to help assign work throughout the GPU. This was a process that has historically been reserved for your CPU, and moving that work onto the graphics card makes processes like DLSS or frame generation much more efficient.

In fact, this efficiency has led Nvidia to fundamentally change how DLSS works, as it’s now running on a Transformer model, rather than a Convolutional Neural Network, or CNN. This won’t necessarily make DLSS any faster, but it absolutely makes a noticeable difference to image quality, eliminating much of the ghosting and other artifacts that have plagued Team Green’s upscaling solution since day one.

But it’s more than just better upscaling. DLSS 4 also includes a new form of Frame Generation that Nvidia is dubbing “Multi-Frame Generation” or MFG. Just like the first generation, MFG uses AI to generate entire frames, based on analyzing frames as they’re rendered, along with motion data gathered from the game engine. The key difference in this generation is that instead of one AI frame from each rendered frame, DLSS 4 now generates up to 3 frames off of each rendered frame. The tradeoff is higher latency, though Nvidia has another bit of tech, called Reflex, which can potentially help offset the increased latency.

With a 300W Total Board Power budget, the RTX 5070 Ti isn’t much more power-hungry than the last-gen RTX 4070 Ti, or even the RTX 4070 Ti Super, which both required 285W. Nvidia does recommend a 750W power supply with the 5070 Ti, but if you really want to be on the safe side, I’d recommend going for at least an 850W PSU, especially if you opt for the high-end MSI Vanguard Edition I got in for review.

DLSS 4 – Is It Worth It?

While the RTX 5070 Ti is faster than its predecessor, Nvidia’s real selling point for this generation is DLSS 4, and particularly multi-frame generation. If you have a gaming monitor with a high refresh rate, this technology will help you get the most out of your display, just don’t go hoping for dramatically better latency.

The way it works is the Tensor Cores will analyze each frame as it’s rendered, and pair that data with motion vector information taken from the game engine to essentially guess where everything in the scene will be in the next frame. It then uses AI to generate entire new frames using this data. The underlying technology here isn’t new – the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 used similar tech – but the difference here is scale.

Rather than only being able to generate one frame in between each rendered frame, MFG allows the graphics card to generate up to three. This can theoretically increase your frame rate by as much as 4x, which can really help saturate high end gaming monitors. In reality, though, it’s rarely a straight 4x improvement.

In Cyberpunk 2077, with the Ray Tracing Overdrive preset, with DLSS set to performance, I was able to get 46 fps on the RTX 5070 Ti, with around 43ms of PC latency. When I turned on 2x frame gen, that number went up to 88 fps, but the latency also increased, up to 49ms, even with Reflex enabled. With 4x frame gen, I was able to get 157 fps, with 55ms of PC latency, making for a 3.4x increase to frame rate, though with worse latency.

In Star Wars Outlaws, the RTX 5070 Ti gets 67 fps at 4K Max settings with DLSS set to “performance”. With 2x frame gen, that number went up to 111 fps. What sets this game apart, however, is that latency actually went down from 47ms to 34ms when enabling frame gen, thanks to Reflex. However, when I bumped it up to 4x frame generation, the frame rate went up to 188 fps, with latency also increasing to 37ms.

So, while Multi Frame Generation will make your games look smoother on a high-refresh display, they won’t actually get more responsive. That’s not to say the games will be laggy with frame generation enabled. The increases to latency are minimal, as long as you’re getting a good frame rate to begin with.

This is because the higher your frame rate is, the more information the frame generation algorithm has to work with, and the better it is at predicting the next image. If you try to enable frame generation and you’re only getting, say, 30 fps, it becomes much more likely that you’re going to get noticeable lag and artifacts as the GPU struggles to predict images accurately. Luckily, that’s not something you’ll have to worry about with the RTX 5070 Ti, even at 4K.

Performance

At 4K, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is about 11% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti Super and 21% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti. That’s a much better generational uplift than the RTX 5080, and makes the RTX 5070 Ti the best value graphics card of this generation so far. Across my entire test suite, the RTX 5070 Ti was easily able to top 60 fps at 4K, even in demanding games like Black Myth Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077.

To be clear: while I did only get in the supercharged RTX 5070 Ti Vanguard SOC from MSI, I ran it at stock settings without overclocking in order to measure how the RTX 5070 Ti performs in general, even if it’s an MSRP card. As such, I’ll be scoring this review based on the $749 MSRP of the base GPU.

I tested all of these graphics cards on the current live version of every game, and with the most recent drivers. That means all Nvidia cards other than the 5070 Ti itself were tested on Game Ready Driver 572.42 and all AMD cards were tested on Adrenalin 24.12.1. The RTX 5070 Ti was tested on a prerelease driver provided by Nvidia. All the games here are tested without any form of Frame Generation, and upscaling is used in games that support both DLSS and FSR, using the appropriate tech for each graphics card.

In 3DMark Speed Way, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has a strong start, scoring 7,590 points to the RTX 4070 Ti Super’s 6,374 and the RTX 4070 Ti’s 5,552 points. That marks a 19% jump over the RTX 4070 Ti Super and a whopping 36% jump over the vanilla RTX 4070 Ti. Likewise, in Port Royal, the RTX 5070 Ti manages 18,839 points, compared to 15,670 and 14,136 from the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Ti, respectively. This shows the potential performance of the RTX 5070 Ti, and how it has room to grow in the future as drivers evolve and games are better engineered to take advantage of Blackwell.

When it comes to actual games, the performance difference over the RTX 4070 Ti wanes a bit, with the RTX 5070 Ti getting 121 fps in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 4K Extreme. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti Super with its 115 fps, that’s only a 5% gen-on-gen improvement, a red flag to be sure.

But, in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most demanding games out there, the RTX 5070 Ti ekes out a 9% lead over the RTX 4070 Ti Super and a 17% lead over the RTX 4070 Ti. Even at 4K with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, the RTX 5070 Ti has no problem sitting at 75 fps, cementing this GPU’s status as a 4K card.

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition is an odd game, in that the only upscaling solution it supports is DLSS, so I test it without it. Under those conditions, the RTX 5070 Ti is only able to manage 48 fps at 4K on the Extreme preset. However, the RTX 4070 Ti Super only gets 45 fps in the same test, with the RTX 4070 Ti lagging further behind with 42 fps.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a bit of an outlier, though, with the RTX 5070 Ti coming in 2% slower than the RTX 4070 Ti Super. The new card gets 113 fps, compared to 115 from the last-generation model, which is a high frame rate, but still a performance loss. Luckily, this is the only game where this happens.

I love testing Total War: Warhammer 3, because it doesn’t support ray tracing or upscaling in any form, so it gives a clear picture on pure rasterization performance. Even at 4K max settings, the RTX 5070 Ti manages an average of 78 fps, making for a 15% improvement over the RTX 4070 Ti Super and 30% over the regular RTX 4070 Ti. This is the closest the RTX 5070 Ti gets to showing off the potential demonstrated in 3DMark.

When I tested the RTX 5090, Assassin’s Creed Mirage had some driver issues that stopped it from showing the 5090’s potential. It seems like those have now been addressed and the RTX 5070 Ti manages 149 fps at 4K with the Ultra High preset. That’s compared to 141 fps from the RTX 4070 Ti Super and 132 fps from the 4070 Ti. However, this is still below the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which manages 150 fps in the same test.

Black Myth Wukong is extremely demanding and is a good showcase of where graphics tech is right now. But, even at 4K with the Cinematic Preset and DLSS set to 40%, the RTX 5070 Ti manages an average of 66 fps. Compared to 60 fps from the RTX 4070 Ti Super, that’s a 10% improvement, and helps avoid any situations where your frame rate will drop below 60 fps. Team Green also takes the performance crown back here, with the AMDRadeon RX 7900 XT also getting just 60 fps in Black Myth Wukong with FSR set to 40%.

While it’s getting old, games like Forza Horizon 5 reward high frame rates, thanks to the fast pace of the gameplay. Luckily, the RTX 5070 Ti does more than keep up, getting 152 fps at 4K with the Extreme preset. That’s a 15% improvement over the RTX 4070 Super and 21% over the RTX 4070 Ti. This is even a 10% lead over the Radeon RX 7900 XT, and Forza is a game that traditionally favors AMD GPUs.

We’re entering a time where even a mid-range graphics card is essentially a ‘4K GPU’. If you can find it around the starting price of $749, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti provides the best value for your money, especially if you have a 4K display. Not only is it the first RTX 5000 graphics card that provides a decent uplift over its predecessor, but it does so with a lower price tag than the $799 RTX 4070 Ti.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra