Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is the company’s attempt at bolstering its sub-$700 lineup targeting a segment of the gaming market that predominantly games at 1440p, but needs an upgrade path toward 4K UHD. Cards from this segment are very much capable of 4K gaming, but require a tiny bit of tweaking. There are also handy features like DLSS to fall back on. NVIDIA already has such a product in the RTX 3070, so why did it need the new RTX 3070 Ti? The answer lies in AMD’s unexpected return to the high-end graphics market with its Radeon RX 6800 series “Big Navi” graphics cards. The RX 6800 was found to outclass the RTX 3070 in most games that don’t use raytracing, and the more recently released RX 6700 XT only adds to the pressure as it trades blows with the RTX 3070 at a slightly lower price.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is among a two-part refresh by NVIDIA for the higher-end of its GeForce RTX 30-series “Ampere” product stack, with the other being the RTX 3080 Ti we reviewed last week. NVIDIA attempted to set the RTX 3070 Ti apart from the RTX 3070 without significantly increasing manufacturing costs (i.e., without having to tap into the larger GA102 silicon). It did this with two changes. First, the RTX 3070 Ti maxes out the GA104 chip, enabling all 6,144 CUDA cores physically present as opposed to the 5,888 on the RTX 3070—a 4% increase. Next, NVIDIA gave the memory sub-system a major boost by giving this card 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory instead of the 14 Gbps GDDR6 on the RTX 3070. This in itself is a 35% increase in memory bandwidth even if the memory size remains the same at 8 GB. Slightly higher GPU clock speeds wrap things up. The idea is to outclass the RX 6700 XT and make up ground lost to the RX 6800.

The “Ampere” graphics architecture debuts the second generation of NVIDIA’s ambitious RTX real-time raytracing technology that combines raytraced elements with conventional raster 3D to significantly improve realism. It combines second-generation RT cores, fixed-function hardware that accelerate raytracing, now even even more raytraced effects, third-generation Tensor cores, which accelerate AI deep-learning and leverage the sparsity phenomenon to significantly increase AI inference performance, and the new Ampere CUDA core that doubles compute performance over the previous generation, leveraging concurrent INT32+FP32 math.

The new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition graphics card comes with an all-new design that looks like a cross between the RTX 3080 FE and RTX 3070 FE. It implements the same dual-axial flow-through concept as the RTX 3080 FE, but with styling elements that remind more of the RTX 3070 FE. The design involves two fans, one on either side of the card, and the PCB being shorter than the card itself, so fresh air drawn in by one fan is exhausted from the other side for better heat dissipation. NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition at $599, a $100 premium over the RTX 3070. We expect that current market conditions will have the card end up at around $1300, matching the RTX 3070 and slightly below the $1400 RX 6800 non-XT.