Bringing 4K gaming closer to the mainstream
When AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 ($579) debuted alongside its bigger, burlier bro (the Radeon RX 6800 XT), most of the coverage focused on AMD’s latest flagship. Now, though, Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, at $599 MSRP, has reignited the conversation around AMD’s somewhat-overlooked, almost-top-of-the-line graphics card, which finds itself competitive with the best Nvidia has to offer at this price point in 2021. These two cards trade barbs while competing for the eyes (and dollars) of gamers using 4K monitors. But just as AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT struggled to keep pace with Nvidia’s near-perfect GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition (at $479 and $499, respectively), the RX 6700 XT falls even further behind when stacked against the RTX 3070 Ti. The RTX 3070 Ti is a clear advance on that Radeon card, but take one step up AMD’s line into RX 6800 territory, and the GeForce value proposition starts to quiver a bit. Factor in design, Nvidia’s support for DLSS, and GeForce driver stability, though, and there are a lot of reasons why the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition card is still a better investment for 4K play than the Radeon RX 6800. It earns our Editors’ Choice award, alongside the original RTX 3070, for bringing 60-frame-per-second play in many games a little bit down-market from the RTX 3080. But by no means is AMD out of this picture. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition Specs: Slicing the GeForce Pie Ever Thinner The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti slots right into the space left between the GeForce RTX 3080 and the original RTX 3070, upping the latter’s MSRP by $100 ($499 to $599), while also sharing the same GA104 die as the first RTX 3070. (MSRPs have become somewhat moot here in 2021; more on that later.) This is in contrast to the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti launched last week, which was much closer in specs and pricing to an RTX 3090 than it was to the RTX 3080. But just how many specs do the two RTX 3070s share, and what’s been upgraded? Let’s take a look… First we have the number of processing cores, which is still well under the RTX 3080’s figure of 8,704, but bumps up the figure from the original RTX 3070 by 256. Next there’s the slightly higher maximum boost clock of 1,770MHz (versus 1,730MHz in the original), as well as an increased power requirement of 290 watts (a 70-watt jump). Also upticked: Some slight boosts in memory bandwidth and in the number of available RT and Tensor cores. Moving onto our comparison against AMD, it’s clear that the RTX 3070 Ti shares more in common with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 than it does with its parallel-named competition, the RX 6700 XT. On raw power alone, it looks like the RX 6800 should prevail across the benchmark suite with ease (higher boost clock, more transistors, larger die, and so on). As we’ll get into more below, however, it’s not always a flat-out win for AMD, depending on the benchmark or the game. RTX 3070 Ti Design: More Founders Edition Glam The Founders Edition cards, as ever, are limited runs of a given GeForce GPU with « pure » Nvidia branding and, in the RTX 30 Series, a unique industrial design. (Other RTX 3070 Ti cards, made by Nvidia’s board « partners, » will take different approaches and looks.) There’s only so much praise we can lay on Nvidia in a single 12-month period for the company’s new, bold approach to card design in its RTX 30 Series line, so we won’t repeat ourselves too much. The quick version? Beautiful design, expertly re-engineered PCB, quiet, and often cooler than the competition. (The last is thanks to a new push-pull fan system spread across a heatsink that takes up more than 50% of the card, in some Founders-design cards.) What’s not to love? The 10.5-inch, double-slot card is exactly an inch larger than the original RTX 3070 Founders Edition, which suggests that Nvidia has designed all its cards in the RTX 30 Series to fit within a specific heatsink size that is the definition of « no more, and no less, than needed. » It’s this attention to engineering that sets the RTX 30 Series Founders Edition cards apart from any other GPUs on the market today (even those of most of Nvidia’s card partners!), and establishes them as the design leaders for the years to come. The card is, once again, fed power by Nvidia’s proprietary 12-pin power connector. However, more evidence of the RTX 3070 Ti’s juiced-up specs here: While the original RTX 3070 needed just a single eight-pin lead (then converted into the 12-pin configuration), the RTX 3070 Ti requires two eight-pin connectors fed into the single 12-pin, much like the next Founders Edition card above it, the RTX 3080. As for the port selection on the rear plane, the design and the number of available slots remains the same among Founders Edition cards in Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series: three DisplayPort 1.4b ports alongside a single HDMI 2.1 output, plus lots of ventilation cutaways for air through-flow. Like on the RTX 3070, one port that was a staple in Nvidia’s previous-architecture « Turing » RTX 20 Series cards is absent here: the USB Type-C-lookalike VirtualLink. Testing the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition: The Radeon RX 6800 Re-Enters the Game So let’s move on to our benchmarking sessions. PC Labs ran the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our 2021 PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor,16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) Z490 motherboard. All cards below were retested on this rig with their latest drivers at launch for an even playing field. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2021 to cut the CPU out of the equation for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.) For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege.
