When Nvidia announced Ampere, most of the attention was focused on the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. It’s the RTX 3070, however, that I suspect will be the most enduring and impactful card in the family.
Last generation, Nvidia raised the price of the RTX 2080 Ti to $1,200, nearly double the price of the GTX 1080 Ti. Now, the company is promising an RTX 3070 that can match the 2080 Ti and costs just 42 percent as much. According to new data released by the company and helpfully tabulated by VideoCardz, we can see exactly what improvements Nvidia is claiming:
First, here’s Nvidia’s graph:
Here’s the VideoCardz summary:
How accurate is this information likely to be? Pretty accurate. Companies don’t typically bother to show incorrect results they know reviewers will be able to disprove. What’s more typical is that they show accurate benchmark results, but cherry-pick the test and settings to showcase products in the most favorable light.
What do we see here? The RTX 3070 appearing to fully match the RTX 2080 Ti’s overall performance. At worst, the two GPUs are the same speed. At best — mostly in applications — the RTX 3070 can be 1.23x faster than the older card.
If we compare the specs of the RTX 3070 with the RTX 2080 Ti, this ranking makes sense. The RTX 2080 Ti has 4,352 GPU cores, 272 texture units, and 88 ROPs. The RTX 3070 has 5,888 cores, 184 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. On paper, we’d expect the RTX 3070 to potentially be even faster over the RTX 2080 Ti than Nvidia is claiming. So on the question of “Is Nvidia presenting cherry-picked tests?” I doubt it. The RTX 3070 is, on average, about 1.6x faster than the RTX 2070, so the upgrade value here is pretty strong, especially if you’re coming from a GPU like the GTX 980 or GTX 1080.
Of course, whether you’ll be able to buy one is anyone’s guess.
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