Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 review, price and more
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 has done for 4K gaming what the GeForce GTX 970 did for 1080p gaming, which is to make it more accessible to most consumers without compromising performance. The 2014 GTX 970 allowed users to experience 1080p gaming at max settings and high frame rates at a more affordable price, delivering legendary performance in games like Witcher 3 and Batman: Arkham Knight, both of which are still CPU-intensive. GPU even by today’s standards.
Years later, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 follows in its footsteps, doing something similar with 4K gaming. Not a perfect comparison, obviously. The GTX 970 was much more reasonably priced, specifically $329 (about £250, AU$460) when it first went on sale. The RTX 3070, meanwhile, costs more at $499 (£469, AU$809). The idea is the same though: both cards made a previously unattainable gaming resolution more accessible to the masses.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 may not offer the same jaw-dropping performance as the GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. However, it is an impressive card in its own right, offering 4K performance that almost rivals that of the RTX 2080 Ti. Without spending $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899) shaped hole in your pocket. And that combination of affordable price and high performance makes it the de facto graphics card for most people.
Price and availability
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is available from October 28 for $499 (£469, AU$809). That price is simply where the RTX 3070 will start, including the Founders Edition reviewed here, with certain aftermarket cards increasing in price from there.
At this price, it’s miles above the closest GPU AMD can offer, with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT lagging 55% in performance at $399 (around £315, AU$580). However, with upcoming AMD Big Navi cards, performance is likely to increase at this price point.
With the level of performance on offer with the RTX 3070, you essentially get for $499 (£469, around AU$700) what it would cost you $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899) with the RTX 2080 Ti just once. week.
Features and chipset
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is powered by the Ampere GA104 GPU. This GPU has 5,888 CUDA cores spread across 46 streaming multiprocessors, based on the same Nvidia Ampere architecture as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. And, as with those cards, there are a ton of improvements in both raw performance and performance. the power efficiency here that drives this mid-range graphics card to performance levels matched only by the best graphics card of the last generation.
The biggest generation-over-generation improvement from Turing to Ampere is that both data paths in the Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) now support FP32 workloads, effectively doubling CUDA cores per SM. This is why, while the RTX 2070 had 36 SMs, it only had 2,304 CUDA cores. So while the RTX 3070 only increases the SM count by 27%, it more than doubles the CUDA core count, greatly increasing raw rasterization performance.
That’s impressive enough, but we’re also getting 2nd generation RT cores and 3rd generation Tensor cores, which means both ray tracing and DLSS are much more effective and efficient. Ray tracing especially is much faster, as this new RT core offers twice the performance of the first generation RT core found in graphics cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. This is why on loads With heavy duty ray tracing like the new 3DMark Port Royal benchmark, the RTX 3070 is able to keep up with the RTX 2080 Ti, even though the last-gen flagship has far more RT cores.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is also the only graphics card in the Ampere lineup with a reasonable level of power consumption, with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) rating of 220W, 100W less than the RTX 3080. This means that the cooling requirements They’re going to be much less intensive than the more powerful Ampere cards, which should be excellent news for people who don’t have a lot of space in their cases for larger graphics cards.
That’s a lot of jargon, but what’s important here is that while the RTX 3070 is a much smaller chip, it can pack a lot more meat, at a lower price point, making the flagship performance last generation is available for the mainstream.
But beyond direct generational improvements in architecture, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 brings a ton of features that will be super useful if you’re into PC gaming or just stuck in endless loops of video calls.
One of the biggest features here is Nvidia Broadcast, which is aimed at people who are streaming games, but the utility is much broader. For example, in video calls, this software will use the artificial intelligence tensor cores to blur or replace the background, and it will do so much more effectively than the options built into programs like Zoom. The best part is that it works regardless of what video conferencing software you are using. Whether you’re on Google Meets or Discord, OBS or Zoom, you can use this software to get rid of the background.
This software is also included in the RTX Voice software that debuted earlier this year, masking background noise from your microphone or even voice inputs from the other people you’re in a meeting with.
There are also a couple of technologies that will directly benefit gamers, namely Nvidia Reflex and RTX IO. RTX IO is perhaps the most important, especially with the next generation of PS5 and Xbox Series X just around the corner, bringing with them truly next-generation data access via their SSD solutions.
Nvidia’s RTX IO will work with the upcoming Microsoft DirectStorage API to optimize data delivery directly from your SSD to the GPU. The way it works now is when a game needs to access data, that data goes from your storage to your CPU, then to system memory, where it’s then fed back through your CPU to your graphics card, to then finally go to your VRAM.
RTX IO, when available, will remove the CPU from that equation, removing one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern PC gaming. There are no games that use this storage API yet, but when it does, we should see massive cuts in both load times and overhead in massive open world games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.