The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is looking like it’s going to redefine what the mid-range gaming market will look like, and basically makes the PS5 irrelevant.
With the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, Nvidia may be shifting what the mid-range PC gaming scene looks like. Coming in at $499 (£469, around AU$680) while delivering performance that Nvidia claims is better than the $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899) RTX 2080 Ti – though that remains to be seen. This graphics card is going to hit the street sometime in October, so obviously we haven’t been able to test it for ourselves. We’re not going to tell you to jump on the pre-order yet, but if everything Nvidia claims is true, whether it’s about the raw graphics performance or the advances in IO performance, it will be a better buy than the PS5 and Xbox Series X, especially if you already have a decent gaming PC on hand. The price-to-performance conversation obviously changes a bit if you have to build a new PC, but even then, PC gaming always carries a higher up-front cost. For all the pomp and circumstance that was the Nvidia GeForce Special Event earlier today, Nvidia has pretty quietly launched the full specs of the three cards announced today. And, well, beyond the fact that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is limited to just 8GB of VRAM, the thing is packing 5,888 CUDA cores with a Boost Clock of 1.73GHz. According to my napkin math, that’s about 20.3 TFLOPs of graphics performance, which tops the 12TFLOPs of the Xbox Series X, the 10.28TFLOPs of the PS5 and even the 13TFLOPs of the previous-generation RTX 2080 Ti. Now, again, I haven’t had a chance to test this out in actual benchmarks, so I can’t speak to how it will look in real-world gaming workloads, but it’s definitely not going to be slower than the RTX 2080 Ti, and at less than half the price, Nvidia has some impressive price-to-performance benefits now. The RTX 3070, then, is going to be way more capable at delivering 4K gaming performance with none of the sacrifices that consoles will make – like checkerboard rendering, low detail settings and the loss of anti-aliasing – and if you already have a rig and you’re looking to upgrade, it’s going to be about the same price.
