Nvidia’s new RTX 3070 Ti graphics card is here, but how does it compare against the
older and cheaper RTX 3070, or should you just pay more and go straight for the 3080?
I’ve compared all three at three different resolutions in 17 different games to show
you where the 3070 Ti fits in.
The 3070 Ti only has 4% more CUDA cores compared to the non Ti card, while the 3080 has a much
larger difference with almost 42% more CUDA cores than the Ti.
The 3080 has 2 gigs of extra VRAM over both 3070 cards, but the new 3070 Ti also uses
GDDR6X memory like the 3080.
Based on these differences, I’m expecting the 3070 and 3070 Ti to be fairly close together.
I’m testing with Nvidia’s founders edition for all three graphics cards at stock.
This is the system that I’m using to test all three GPUs in, so AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU
and 32 gigs of DDR4-3200 memory are the key specs.
I’ve used MSI’s B550 Tomahawk motherboard and resizable BAR was enabled on all three
cards.
We'll start out by looking at gaming benchmarks followed by things like power draw, content
creator workloads, then pricing and availability afterwards, or you can time travel to whichever
part is relevant to you with those timestamps below.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little china with the street kid life path.
I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom, 1440p results in the middle, and 4K up the
top.
As expected, the 3080 is doing the best out of the three options, though as I suspected
based on the specs, the performance gap also appears bigger between it and the 3070 Ti
compared to the 3070 and 3070 Ti.
Even the 1% lows from the 3080 are ahead of the average FPS of the 3070 Ti at 1440p and
4K resolutions.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested using the games benchmark.
Again the 3080 has a larger lead over the 3070 Ti, at 1440p the 3080 is reaching a 19%
higher average frame rate when compared to the 3070 Ti, while the 3070 Ti is 7% ahead
of the 3070 at the same resolution, which in this case is about 8 FPS or so, less of
a difference.
I’ve tested Control with and without ray tracing, let’s start with ray tracing off.
This is a GPU heavy game, so it’s not surprising that at 1080p the 3070 Ti saw the biggest
performance improvement when compared to the 3070 at this lower resolution out of all 17
titles tested.
It’s just 13 FPS ahead, which is almost a 10% increase to average FPS, while the 3080
was 21% ahead of the 3070 Ti.
Things obviously drop back with ray tracing enabled, and we could of course improve all
of these results by enabling DLSS as all cards support it, but I wanted to get an idea of
the differences in ray tracing.
At 1440p the 3070 Ti was reaching 10% higher average FPS compared to the 3070, while the
3080 was 27% ahead of the 3070 Ti, a much larger difference, though it does also have
42% more RT cores.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was tested in the Sydney landing challenge.
There’s no real practical difference between all three GPUs at both 1080p and 1440p in
this test, things only start looking different at 4K.
The 3070 Ti is only 5% ahead of the 3070 at this highest resolution, the smallest difference
out of all 17 games I tested at 4K.
Meanwhile the 3080 was reaching 22% higher average FPS compared to the 3070 Ti at 4K.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was tested with the game's benchmark, and was another game
that saw below average differences between these three cards.
The 3080 was just able to hit 60 FPS in this test even at 4K, putting it 15% ahead of the
3070 Ti, but this was the smallest difference at 4K out of all games tested.
This game generally sees much bigger gains with AMD’s Radeon cards, and I’ll be comparing
the 3070 Ti against the RX 6800 tomorrow so make sure you’re subscribed for that.
Watch Dogs Legion was also tested with the game's benchmark.
The differences were typically bigger here, though still not that much change between
the 3070 and 3070 Ti, the Ti was only around three to four FPS ahead of the non Ti, maybe
not a difference worth paying for in this game.
The 3070 Ti was reaching 6% higher average FPS over the 3070 at 1440p, while the 3080
was 17% ahead of the 3070 Ti.
Fortnite was tested with the same replay file with each graphics card, but as an esports
title even at max settings we’re getting high frame rates at 1080p and 1440p.
4K is perfectly playable too, though the 3080 was reaching 22% higher average FPS compared
to the 3070 Ti, while the 3070 Ti was 10% ahead of the 3070, the 2nd biggest difference
at this resolution out of all 17 games covered.
It’s worth noting this game is about to have an update that may make epic settings
more GPU heavy compared to what I’ve shown here.
I’ve also tested 10 more games in addition to the 7 newer titles we just went through,
but rather than talk through each individual game and keep you here forever I’ll just
skip through them now, as for the most part the results aren’t all that different to
what we’ve already seen.
Feel free to pause the video at any time for a closer look, but for now let’s dig into
the overall differences between these three graphics cards at three different resolutions.
On average the new RTX 3070 Ti is less than 6% faster over the RTX 3070 in all 17 games
at the lower 1080p resolution.
Some games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and F1 2020 saw basically no differences,
while best case titles like Fortnite and Control were almost 10% faster with the Ti.
Generally lower differences are expected at lower resolutions.
Stepping up to 1440p and the 3070 Ti is now almost 7% ahead of the 3070, as higher resolutions
typically make better use of the GPU.
That said some games still had very small improvements with the Ti, while again best
case we’re looking at about 10% gains on offer from the newer Ti graphics card.
Now at the highest 4K resolution the 3070 Ti was about 8% faster than the 3070 in terms
of average FPS.
There are a few more games around the 10% improvement point now, however this is still
about the biggest difference that we’re seeing, with a bit of an extra boost noted
in Warzone up the top.
Now let’s look at how much faster the 3080 is over the new 3070 Ti.
Starting at 1080p it’s reaching 14% higher average FPS on average, a much larger difference
compared to what we saw when comparing the 3070 and 3070 Ti at all three resolutions
on average.
The 3080 was close to 18% faster on average when compared to the 3070 Ti at the higher
1440p resolution, with around 8 games reaching 20% higher average FPS or above, so much better
differences compared to the 3070 and 3070 Ti.
At 4K the 3080 was now reaching 23% higher average FPS compared to the 3070 Ti, now pretty
much every game with the exception of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla down the bottom is able to
get a 20% per This could be the extra 2 gigs of VRAM in the 3080 stretching its legs.
Here’s how much power the whole PC was pulling from the wall in Control at 4K max settings.
The system with the 3070 Ti was using about 19% more power compared to the same system
with the 3070 installed, though there was just a 9% boost to FPS there.
Meanwhile when the system had the 3080 installed it was drawing 9% more power from the wall
compared to the 3070 Ti, but there was a 23% boost to average FPS, so although the 3080
is using the most power it seems worthwhile relative to the higher performance increase.
Just before we get into pricing, let's also see how all three graphics cards compare in
content creator workloads - it’s not all just about gaming.
I’ve tested DaVinci Resolve with the Puget Systems benchmark, and all three are scoring
quite closely together, the gap isn’t quite as big between the 3070 Ti and 3080 compared
to most of the games just covered, the 3080 was scoring just 6% higher.
Again the differences in Adobe Premiere weren’t that big either, but this test typically depends
less on the GPU than resolve, so the 3080 was now less than 5% ahead of the 3070 Ti.
Blender was tested with the Open Data benchmark, and when using CUDA the 3070 and 3070 Ti are
extremely close together, makes sense given the CUDA core counts are very close together
while the 3080 has many more.
Percentage wise, the 3070 Ti is now faster than the 3070 when using OptiX, which uses
ray tracing to accelerate the workload, though the difference between the 3080 is still bigger.
Although V-Ray was also tested using CUDA, the differences between the 3070 and 3070
Ti were bigger here, with the Ti scoring 10% higher than the non Ti, then the 3080 was
around 9% ahead of the 3070 Ti.
Now let’s discuss prices, or at least try to given the difficulties with all the availability
issues.
Most new graphics cards have been out of stock for months now with increased prices, that
said though you can try and find updated prices for all three of these models with the links
down in the description.
With that in mind, these are the cost per frame differences between all three graphics
cards when assuming MSRP values, which I admit may not be particularly useful today, but
I don’t have a whole lot to work with, it’s just difficult to get accurate pricing in
today’s market, it is what it is.
Hopefully this is more useful in future if things ever recover.
Anyway the RTX 3080 is offering better value compared to the new 3070 Ti at both 1440p
and 4K resolutions, while 1080p is extremely close.
Based on Nvidia’s own prices, which again are basically useless at the moment, the 3070
Ti doesn’t offer great value despite being directly in between the 3070 and 3080 in terms
of MSRP.
At the end of the day you’ll probably just be buying whatever's in stock, but as we’ve
seen the new 3070 Ti doesn’t offer us all that much extra compared to the older 3070,
at least when compared to the bigger performance gap between the 3070 Ti and the 3080.
Of course not everyone can justify paying more for a 3080, even if you can find one
in stock, but as I’ll show you in tomorrow’s video when I compare the 3070 Ti against AMD’s
RX 6800, apart from features like ray tracing and DLSS, the 3070 Ti is just less appealing.
Make sure you’re subscribed for that upcoming comparison between Nvidia and AMD coming tomorrow,
come and join me in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel
on Patreon, and for now, it’s kind of awkward to point with a graphics card, you can check
out some of my other GPU comparisons over here, I’ll see you over in one of those
next.