Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. RTX 3070 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark Port Royal6. Control7. Death Stranding8. The Division 29. Far Cry New Dawn10. Gears 511. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint12. Metro Exodus13. Middle Earth: Shadow of War14. Red Dead Redemption 215. Shadow of the Tomb Raider16. Total War Saga: Troy17. Performance Summary (11 Game Average)18. Cost Per Frame Analysis19. RTX On - Control20. RTX On - Metro Exodus21. RTX On - Shadow of the Tomb Raider22. DLSS On - Control & Death Stranding23. Productivity: Blender & Octane24. Productivity: SPECviewPerf & V-Ray25. Clock Speed26. Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Power Consumption29. Performance Per Watt30. Overclocking31. Closing Thoughts32. View All Pages

Following hot on the heels of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, today we are stepping down the stack with our first look at Nvidia's RTX 3070. Priced at £469 here in the UK, it's certainly not a small investment, but Nvidia will hope this GPU can capture a larger share of the market than the £650 RTX 3080 or the £1399 RTX 3090. Is this graphics card really faster than the RTX 2080 Ti as Nvidia claims?

It's certainly been an interesting launch for Nvidia's new RTX 30-series. RTX 3080 arrived first, and was deservedly praised for offering a huge leap in performance compared to the previous-generation RTX 2080. The RTX 3090 swiftly followed, and while it offered further performance gains for 4K gamers, the high price tag was always going to limit the audience to just the most cash-rich of enthusiasts.

Now, with the RTX 3070, Nvidia is targeting a wider audience thanks to the more accessible £469 price point. I'd hardly call this a ‘cheap' graphics card, but it's the most mainstream Ampere GPU we have seen so far. Nvidia didn't shy away from making some bold claims about this new GPU either, as we heard from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that the RTX 3070 is in fact faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, last generation's flagship GPU which sold for over £1000.

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 2080 Ti (FE)	RTX 2080 SUPER
SMs	82	68	46	68	48
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	5888	4352	3072
Tensor Cores	328	272	184	544	384
RT Cores	82	68	46	68	48
Texture Units	328	272	184	272	192
ROPs	112	96	96	88	64
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1635 MHz	1815 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15.5 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	11GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	352-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	616 GB/sec	496.1 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	220W	260W	250W

While it was announced at the same livestreamed event as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, we've not heard too much about the RTX 3070 in the intervening period. To recap its core spec, unlike its more expensive RTX 30-series brethren, the 3070 uses Nvidia's GA104 GPU, instead of GA102. GA104 incorporates 46 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere's new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving RTX 3070 a total of 5888.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 46 RT cores and 184 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 184 texture units, and 96 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 6 GPCs in total for RTX 3070.

Clock speed is slightly higher than the RTX 3080. The RTX 3070 Founders Edition has a reference clock of 1725MHz, and unlike some of the 20-series FE cards, this model is not factory overclocked – Nvidia is leaving that for its AIB partners this time around.

For the memory, here things depart from what we saw with the RTX 3080 and 3090. Gone is Micron's GDDR6X, and we are back to 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus, for total memory bandwidth of 448 GB/Sec. My particular Founders Edition model uses Samsung G6 memory, but according to Nvidia, RTX 3070 boards will use either Samsung or Micron G6.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3070 for 220W. This is 45W above the RTX 2070, though still 30W less than a reference RTX 2080 Ti, and of course Nvidia is claiming the RTX 3070 is as fast, if not faster, than the 2080 Ti. We will of course be testing that claim today, and seeing just how power efficient this GPU is.

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