The RTX 4070 has landed – but can it beat the venerable RTX 3080, a more expensive last-gen graphics card?
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 has finally arrived, and we’re pumped – at long last, a next-gen graphics card that doesn’t require you to negotiate a bank loan before you buy it!
We’re exaggerating, of course; its big brother the RTX 4070 Ti is already more affordable and offers better performance-per-dollar than the more powerful cards in Nvidia’s ‘Lovelace’ RTX 4000 lineup, but it’s great to see an actual midrange GPU landing. At $599, this is the card most PC gamers are realistically going to want – but is it the best choice?
We’ve already compared the new GPU to its direct precursor, the RTX 3070, and concluded that while it’s the superior card, the lower price of the 3070 means that it’s still a very strong value proposition versus its successor. But how does the RTX 4080 stack up against a more expensive GPU from Nvidia’s previous generation?
Enter the RTX 3080: the graphics card that brought 4K gaming to the masses back in the locked-down days of 2021. Mass-scale scalping and crypto mining might’ve meant that not as many gamers got their hands on the 3080 as they’d have liked – but in this post-crypto-crash world, GPUs are more accessible. Why not pick up a last-gen card instead of spending hours hunting for a newly-launched next-gen model?
It’s a valid question, and Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series remains relevant to this day; so we’re going to break down the nitty-gritty details and help you work out what the best graphics card for you is. Let’s get down to business.Nvidia RTX 4070 vs RTX 3080: Price
On paper, the RTX 4070 should win this round cleanly. After all, its $599 / £599 / around AU$900 MSRP sits it squarely beneath the RTX 3080, which retailed for $699 / £649 / about AU$950.
You’ll notice there’s no regional currency adjustment this time around though, so the RTX 4070 is effectively more expensive in most regions outside the US, which is a shame for non-Americans. It’s also generationally more expensive than its predecessor, which hurts its value proposition somewhat; the RTX 3070 retailed for $499 / £469 / AU$809 back in 2021.
Of course, the RTX 4070 is likely to be scalped and price-gouged to all hell in the period immediately after its launch (that sucks), but we won’t factor that in here – it’s not really Nvidia’s fault, after all. The pricing will hopefully stabilize somewhat, and retailers are likely to run ‘lotteries’ for retail-price cards, as they did with the RTX 4090 launch.
On the other side, it’s still hard to find an RTX 3080 at its original retail price; sure, you can pick up this $699 model on Newegg (opens in new tab), but it’s a Biostar card – not one of the mainstream GPU brands we’d typically recommend. RTX 3080 cards from more trusted manufacturers such as Asus and Gigabyte will run you upwards of $900 right now.
This is doubly strange given that the similarly-priced RTX 4070 Ti is now available (as well as the far less impressive RTX 4080, the 3080’s direct descendant) has been available for a little while now. It’s possible the 3080’s pricing will drop a bit in the wake of the 4070’s arrival, but nobody can truly predict that.
Ultimately, GPU pricing remains at the mercy of many external factors; the current explosion in AI research thanks to everyone’s favorite chatbot ChatGPT is threatening to lead to another GPU shortage, and there’s not much Nvidia (or PC gamers as a whole) can do about that.
