- This is real footage captured outside
a Micro Center computer store in Dallas, Texas.
And you might think that Twitch streamer
Preston A Lewis was filming a black Friday shopping rush
or something, but no.
No one in this crowd of people
was hoping for a discount at all.
The shortage of GPUs has gotten so dire
that this is how desperate people are
just to buy a graphics card at an MSRP that has already
been twice inflated since the release
of NVIDIA's 30 series, once by component shortages,
then again, by tariffs on U.S. imports from China
which makes NVIDIA's pricing for the new 3070 Ti
really confusing because 599 for this much raw power
that would have been a decent deal even before the shortage.
And what makes it especially unexpected
is that last week's 3080 Ti was also competitively priced
but only in the context of the current landscape
where this untested 2080 Ti on eBay
sold for $1000.
Is NVIDIA trying to start street brawls?
Or, did they travel to an alternate timeline
and bring this thing back for the good of all gamers?
And if they did just, how good is it?
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599 puts the 3070 Ti smack dab in the middle of the RTX 3070
and RTX 3080, both in terms of price
and product positioning, which, in itself
makes sense because unlike the RTX 3080 Ti
which was pretty much a watered down RTX 3090,
the RTX 3070 Ti is more of a beefed up RTX 3070.
It shares the same GA 104 GPU with about 4% more cores,
with the same eight gigs of GDDR6 memory
on the same 256 bit bus, pretty unexciting.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I say the same GDDR6 memory?
What I should have probably mentioned
is that it is much faster.
Clocking in at a good 2.5 gigahertz higher,
we're looking at an effective bandwidth boost
of 160 gigabytes per second, which is nearly a 24% increase.
Consequently, the rated graphics power
is a hefty 70 Watts higher and the cooler
is a new ambiguent design that looks something
like a cross between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070
with the same totally necessary
and very industry standard 12-pin connector,
though at least to NVIDIA's credit, they were kind enough
to angle it instead and having it stick straight out
like the old 3070.
So the hope then, both for NVIDIA and for the rest of us
is that if the cooler is in between the two cards,
the RTX 3070 Ti's performance will be as well
despite it having just 4% more cores
than its namesake and a whopping 29% fewer cores
than the RTX 3080.
Now, since the testing is happening so soon
after our RTX 3080 Ti review,
we're gonna be using the same bench in the same patch state
and we'll even be wearing the same shirt
and the same underwear from lttstore.com,
freshly washed of course though.
Starting with Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition,
the story is already looking pretty interesting
for the 3070 Ti.
It managed an average frame rate 12% higher than the 3070,
which is good, but then that also puts it a good 19% lower
than the RTX 3080, which is, hmm.
F1 2020 tightens the spread somewhat though
with a 10% lead over the 3070 and at 12% loss
against the 3080 and Forza Horizon 4 actually continues
along this trajectory, giving us the best result yet.
So it appears that high frame rates favor
the 3070 Ti's additional memory bandwidth
while lower frame rates really want for more cores.
And this appears to bear out in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
where frame rates dip way back down to earth
and actually AMD's RX 6700 XT manages to eclipse
not only the 3070 and 3070 Ti, but even the 3080.
CS Goal is another chance for the 3070 Ti's
lightening fast memory to make up ground,
but while it manages to get close
to the middle of the 3070 and 3080,
it ends up closer to the former.
Not gonna lie though, given that we're looking
at a handful of extra cores and a hefty memory over clock,
I'm pretty impressed but how much are those gonna help
if you wanna do anything other than gaming?
As it turns out, not much.
The RTX 3070 Ti doesn't manage much
in the way of an improvement over the RTX 3070,
and loses badly to the RTX 3080
in rendering with both Blender and V-Ray
while Creative Cloud doesn't really show enough variation
between the cards to warrant picking up one
over the other.
OctaneBench is a little better than Blender
but we're still looking at a much closer result
to the 3070 than to the 3080
and this trend continues pretty hardcore
into SPECviewperf where the RTX 3080 stomps
all over or both of it's GA 104 equipped competitors.
The only thing that could be considered a win here
is the energy benchmark where the 3070 Ti's
additional memory bandwidth pushes it far enough away
from the 3070 to find that middle ground again.
So, what have we learned then?
It turns out that fast memory on a GPU
can be good, very good, but then it's also very situational.
And we also learned that fast memory with more cores
is better than just fast memory in every conceivable way.
Okay, we didn't really learn either of those things,
but, it's always nice to get refresher isn't it?
And on that subject, let's talk cooling.
The bigger heat sink on the RTX 3070 Ti founder's edition
meant that it didn't get all that much hotter
than the RTX 3070 and with a peak of just
a little higher than 78 degrees at an average of 64 degrees
across our SPECviewperf test,
we're looking at a respectable result
all things considered.
Power consumption however, is less so.
The 3070 Ti ends up sitting much closer to the 3080
than its performance would suggest
at 311 Watts peak and 151 Watts average,
that's about 20% more power draw than it's non-Ti cousin,
and most of this appears to come from the up clocked memory
considering how few additional GPU cores there are
and the fact that when we look at core clocks,
the 3070 Ti consistently runs about a 100 megahertz lower
than both the 3070 and the 3080.
At the end of the day though, our recommendation
like with the RTX 3080 Ti is going to be
to immediately buy this card at MSRP, if you can.
And I know that not everyone agreed
with our conclusion last time, but the truth is
I stand behind what I said a 100%
because no matter who you are,
are you a filthy scalper looking to make a quick buck?
Or are you a gamer who happens to have that much money
to spend on a graphics card?
Whichever one you are, both of the new Ti variants
at MSRP of course, are going to be a much better deal
than anything that you're getting on the secondary market.
And sure, you can compare these cards to suggested pricing
from a year ago, but the reality of the situation
is that outside of the handful of cards that NVIDIA sells
through their web store, those cards at those prices,
they don't actually exist.
And that might make you mad, but shooting the messenger
isn't gonna get you anywhere,
and besides, I did warn after all.
So, yeah, it's a great GPU with great NVIDIA features
like DLSS, high-quality hardware video encoding,
and more and 599, it's an absolute bargain
for this class of GPU in the current conditions.
Will the 3070 Ti still make sense when the dust settles?
Honestly, my money's on, not really,
but, I suppose only time can tell for sure
and by the look of things, it's going to be a long time.
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So thanks for watching guys,
go check out our recent video, where we got verified
actual gamers to compete against yours truly
for a chance to get a GPU at that elusive MSRP.
Actually some of them even ended up with discounts,
they beat me.