How good is Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti video card?

Martin Brinkmann
Jun 10, 2021
Hardware
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Late last month, NVIDIA announced two additions to its graphic cards portfolio. The new "gaming flagship" GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The flagship model launched on June 3rd, 2021 officially, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti a week later on June 10th, 2021.

If you know your way around video cards, you know that it is quite difficult to obtain reasonably priced cards due to the current market situation.

The RTX 3070 Ti is priced at $599 by NVIDIA, $100 more than last year's NVIDIA RTX 3070 card, which NVIDIA priced at $499.

According to NVIDIA's announcement, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti "boosts performance with more CUDA Cores and our super speed GDDR6X memory". While that sounds good on paper, it is less than 5% of an increase over the $100 cheaper RTX 3070 video card. RAM on the other hand has been improved significantly, as NVIDIA decided to use GDDR6X memory in the new card, which was only used in 3080 and 3090 cards up until now. PC Gamer ran benchmarks and RAM performance saw an impressive boost (608GB/s over 448GB/s).

Memory performance improves significantly, but the card has only 8 Gigabytes of it. That's fine compared to NVIDIA's own GeForce 3070 card, but not when you look at AMD's Radeon RX 6800 card, which comes with 16 Gigabytes. AMD's card was a bit on the pricey side when compared to the 3070, as it retails for $579, but it fares better against NVIDIA's new card as it is cheaper and comes with more RAM.

Memory is not everything though, as performance is what ultimately matters for gamers. Benchmarks by PC Gamer show very similar performance for NVIDIA's card and AMD's card. Performance differed slightly in the 4K benchmarks, e.g. 56 to 57 average FPS in Metro Exodus, or 67 to 62 average FPS in Horizon Zero Dawn.

Benchmarks by The Verge paint a similar picture at 1440P and 4K. Compared to the 3070, the 3070 Ti does better in most benchmarks, but not by much. In some, its performance was worse.

NVIDIA claims that the 3070 Ti delivers a 1.5x performance improvement over the RTX 2070 Super, and a 2x improvement over the GTX 1070 Ti.

Gamers who run older video cards will see higher performance improvements. The 3070 Ti is not designed as a replacement for the 3070, but likely released by Nvidia to have a competing model for AMD's RX 6800 card (which offers better performance than the regular 3070 version, but comes with a higher price tag).

NVIDIA customers who run older video cards can now select NVIDIA's latest model over AMD's.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti closes the gap to AMD's RX 6800, but it has a slightly higher price and less RAM.

Chance is high that you won't be able to buy the new video card anytime soon, as demand is much higher than what is actually available.

To answer the title question: it is quite a good card, but not convincing enough to send out a strong "buy me instead of AMD" signal to gamers.

Now You: do you pay attention to video card releases? Which card do you favor?

Summary
How good is Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti video card?
Article Name
How good is Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti video card?
Description
NVIDIA's new video card GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is now available officially as of June 10th, 2021. How good is it?
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. mau said on June 11, 2021 at 8:42 pm
    Reply

    at the prices now, if you get an nvidia or amd, rtx2 or 3, at a good price (very rare) it really don’t matter specs much anymore..

  2. Harro Glööckler said on June 10, 2021 at 4:13 pm
    Reply

    > How good is Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti video card?
    Sadly not good enough for the price it’ll sell for. People are very naive if they think it will be available anywhere near the announced $599…it’s gonna be more like $2000.

    Some days ago i’ve seen a “bargain” ads for 3060 for over 1000€ and 3080 for 2000€. No thank you, my existing 2070 Super is fine even if i consider it a bad purchase over my previous 970; i’ve got it last year just because of the scary leaked videos from China and was worried there won’t be anyone left to make me a cheap card. I’m happy the workers didn’t disappear, but sadly card prices raised anyways because of totally different reasons.

    1. Lindsay said on June 11, 2021 at 7:55 am
      Reply

      They’re well over $1k in Australia… if you can find one.

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