RTX 3070 Ti review: In a weird spot, but a decent card you could settle for

The RTX 3070 Ti looks like a card that will bridge the performance gap between the Nvidia RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, and we must say that it even challenges the AMD RX 6800 (non-XT) in terms of price.

But will it match up to the RX 6800 in performance, or perhaps even beat it out? We'll let you know in this review.

Let’s also not talk about the worldwide shortage of GPUs that we’re experiencing right now. We know that some cards are way overpriced, either by scalpers, or some shop retailers. This review is solely based on the price-to-performance ratio based on the cards’ MSRP given by Nvidia and AMD.

Full disclosure, we were sent the Founder’s Edition of the RTX 3070 TI by Nvidia for this review, and since we are in the South East Asia region, it is highly unlikely that it will be officially sold anywhere around this area. This review will just concentrate on the stock performance of the RTX 3070 Ti vs the RTX 3080 and the AMD RX 6800. You can expect similar performance from any stock RTX 3070 Ti that is produced by Nvidia’s GPU partners (ie: Asus, Palit etc). We do not have the original RTX 3070 to compare to.

And since the Founder’s Edition can’t be bought in this region, we will only briefly touch on the design and build quality of the card.

The cooler on the RTX 3070 Ti is very similar to the blowthrough design found on the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti, as opposed to the double fan design of the original RTX 3070 FE. This indicates that it may run slightly hotter than your typical RTX 3070, but since we do not have an RTX 3070 FE for comparison, we are unable to verify this.

We can predict why, though, as the original RTX 3070 comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, while the Ti variant comes with 8GB of GDDR6X memory. From our previous testing on our yTech series, we know that the GDDR6X runs a tad hotter (and also faster) than your typical GDDR6 memory.

The unit also comes with the proprietary 12-pin connecter that Nvidia uses for their Founder Edition cards, and it plugs into 2 8-pin power connecters from our power supply unit.

Specifications:

• CUDA cores : 6144

• 3rd gen Tensor cores: 192

• 2nd gen RT cores: 48

• Base Clock: 1575Mhz

• Boost Clock: 1770Mhz

• TDP: 290W

• Memory: 8GB GDDR6X

• Memory bus width: 256-bit

Test bench:

• Intel Core i9-11900K

• Asus Maximus XIII Z590 Hero

• 32GB Crucial Ballistix 3600Mhz CL16 RAM (16GBx2)

• Samsung 970 EVO 500GB SSD

• Seasonic Prime Gold 750W PSU

GPUs for comparison:

• ASUS TUF Gaming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

• AMD Radeon RX 6800 Reference Edition

All tests were done at stock speeds for the GPUs. None of the cards were overclocked to maintain ”out-of-the-box” results.

Results:

As you can see from the graphs, the RTX 3070 Ti is roughly on par with the AMD RX 6800 in most of the games. Overall, we expected it to be slightly closer to the RTX 3080’s performance, but that was not the case.

One thing to note, we feel that the 3070 Ti’s VRAM may be affected by the difference in memory bus widths between the 3080 (320-bit) and the 3070 Ti (256-bit).

Thermals during this run weren't that high as well, hitting only a 74C maximum during the highest loads, similar to our Asus TUF RTX 3080.

Let’s take a look at the game and resolution specifics.

1080p:

In VALORANT, because the game has easy to meet requirements to run smoothly, we don’t see much of a difference in the fps count, even though it’s there.

The game mostly bottlenecks the at the CPU for the amount of frames that it can push out per second, so it really doesn’t matter that much.

For Borderlands 3, the RX 6800 clearly beats out the RTX 3070 Ti, but like we mentioned earlier, this game prefers AMD GPUs, so this is not a surprising turn of events.

For Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite, the 3070 Ti is on a par with the RX 6800 in terms of average fps.

However, even at 1080p, the RTX 3070 Ti is already showing its disadvantages when pit against its bigger brother, the RTX 3080, for heavily rendered games.

1440p:

Once resolutions get bumped up, the 3080 pulls marginally ahead in some titles. For VALORANT, the 3070 Ti performs about 15 per cent slower than the 3080. But in games like Warzone and Fortnite, we see that 3080 pulling ahead with 20 per cent higher framerates.

In all fairness, at this resolution, the 3070 Ti still offers a lot for the gamer that is only going to play games at 1440p and nothing more. Nvidia has touted this card to be very strong at 1440p, and we do not disagree there.

4K:

This is where the 3070 Ti starts to falter. No doubt, this card was never designed for 4K gaming anyway.

Again, VALORANT's low requirements mean the card still holds up pretty well at 4K for this title, but gets hit hard in Borderlands.

When running Warzone and Fortnite at 4K, performances dip much lower than the 3080. Like we mentioned earlier, the extra performance hit may be due to the narrower memory bus of the 3070 Ti, and also having 2GB less VRAM than the 3080.

Nevertheless, Nvidia cards have an ace up their sleeve at this resolution on some games (for the time being), called Nvidia DLSS.

Value:

In terms of MSRP pricing, the AMD RX 6800 retails at US$579, the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti at US$599, and the Nvidia RTX 3080 at US$699.

The vanilla RTX 3070 retails at US$499, so you would expect that the RTX 3070 Ti to have the performance that is in the middle of the vanilla RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

When Nvidia released the RTX 3070, it was supposed to be a cheaper alternative to the RX 6800. Sure, the RTX 3070 fell a little short overall, but it was more value at $499 than the RX 6800 which was priced at $80 more.

For the RTX 3070 Ti to release at around the same price point as the RX 6800, and not offer anything more in terms of performance besides DLSS and Raytracing, feels a little underwhelming, if we're being honest.

The RTX 3070 Ti, despite being 20 per cent more expensive than the vanilla RTX 3070, doesn’t seem to display a 20 per cent performance boost over its predecessor. Again, we did not have the actual RTX 3070 to confirm this on our own,

But when you compare it to the RX 6800, you are basically paying a US$20 dollar premium to get access to Raytracing and Nvdia’s DLSS, since both the cards perform almost on a par with each other.

Also to note, AMD will be releasing their version of DLSS soon, called AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, and if AMD is able to get that technology on par with Nvidia’s DLSS, it may be worthwhile to invest your money in the RX 6800 or the RX 6700XT instead because it is cheaper.

Alternatively, you can simply camp out for the vanilla RTX 3070 or for something lower-end like the RTX 3060 Ti , both of which are cheaper and still pretty capable cards at 1440p.

Conclusion:

The truth is, just looking at performances alone, we can't quite tell who the RTX 3070 Ti is targeted at.

If you want a good 1440p card, it already exists in the form of the RTX 3070. Having only a slight bump in performance and a higher TDP (Nvidia recommends a 750w PSU to run this card), but having to pay a 20 per cent premium over the RTX 3070, makes the RTX 3070 Ti a pretty tough recommendation for a GPU, all things being equal.

That being said, if you can’t find an RTX 3070 out in the wild, this card may be your only shot for a mid-range GPU.

You could simply get an RX 6700 XT, or the RX 6800, but none of those cards come with the new crypto-mining limiter, which may present of the biggest advantage of the 3070 Ti — it's available and not being hoarded by cryptocurrency miners.

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