NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Review – Full Fat GA104

It's time for something super, the GeForce RTX 3070 gets the Titanium treatment with the release of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The Ampere GPU is built upon the foundation set by Turing. Termed as its biggest generational leap, the NVIDIA Ampere GPUs excel compared to previous generations at everything.

The Ampere lineup offers faster shader performance, faster ray tracing performance, and faster AI performance. Built on a brand new process node and featuring an architecture designed from the ground up, Ampere is a killer product with lots of numbers to talk about.

The fundamental of Ampere was to take everything NVIDIA learned with its Turing architecture and not only refine it but to use its DNA to form a product in a completely new performance category. Tall claims were made by NVIDIA when they introduced its Ampere lineup earlier this month & we will be finding out whether NVIDIA hit all the ticks with its Ampere architecture as this review will be your guiding path to see what makes Ampere and how it performs against its predecessors.

Now NVIDIA is taking things one step ahead with the launch of its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards that are designed to compete with the Radeon RX 6900 & RX 6800 series graphics cards.

Turing wasn't just any graphics core, it was the graphics core that was to become the foundation of future GPUs. The future is realized now with next-generation consoles going deep in talks about ray tracing and AI-assisted super-sampling techniques. NVIDIA had a head start with Turing and its Ampere generation will only do things infinitely times better.

The Ampere GPU does many traditional things that we would expect from a GPU, but at the same time, also breaks the barrier when it comes to untraditional GPU operations. Just to sum up some features:

The technologies mentioned above are some of the main building blocks of the Ampere GPU, but there's more within the graphics core itself which we will talk about in detail so let's get started.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series is made up of a diverse portfolio of graphics cards. The lineup starts at the GeForce RTX 3060 with an MSRP of $329 US and goes all the way up to higher-end configurations starting at $499 US for the GeForce RTX 3070, $599 US for the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, $699 US for the GeForce RTX 3080, $1199 US for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and $1499 US for the GeForce RTX 3090. NVIDIA themselves call the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the flagship graphics card and not the GeForce RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 & RTX 3070 are both priced well and in line with their predecessors but the GeForce RTX 3090 goes all out with a price of $1499 US. Even the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has seen a price hike compared to the MSRP of the RTX 2080 Ti ($999 US vs $1199 US). NVIDIA calls the GeForce RTX 3090 the "BFGPU" and as per the terminology, it seems like this is a new marketing name for the Titan graphics card. It is likely that we could see a Titan-based card under the Quadro branding with faster specs out of the box but the GeForce RTX 3090 is purely a gaming graphics card first with all the horsepower for intense professional and workstation workloads.

With that said, the GeForce RTX 3080 replaces the RTX 2080 SUPER at the same price point and the GeForce RTX 3070 replaces the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER at the same price point. Given this trend, we might see the more mainstream variants cost just as much as their RTX 20 SUPER series cards but with a higher performance out of the box.

In addition to the specs/price update, NVIDIA's RTX technologies are being widely adopted by major game engines and APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX (DXR), Vulkan, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite. While there were only three RTX titles around the launch of the RTX 20 series cards, NVIDIA now has at least 28 titles that utilize their RTX feature set to offer real-time ray tracing with more coming soon.

In addition to that, with the upcoming consoles confirmed to feature ray tracing, developers can also make use of the RTX technology to fine-tune future games for the GeForce RTX hardware. Currently, NVIDIA has 13 game engines that are leveraging their RTX technologies for use in their upcoming and existing games while both Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs are part of the RTX ecosystem on the PC platform.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card which comes in at the MSRP (if you're lucky) of $599.99 US.

After the launch of AMD's Radeon RX 6800 series, the GeForce RTX 3070 fell below the RX 6800 in terms of raster performance. While it did keep the lead with RTX and DLSS titles, NVIDIA decided that it was time to fully outpace the Radeon RX 6800 with a new Ti offering. The answer is the RTX 3070 Ti.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is designed to be a 1440p gaming solution and as such, it rocks the full GA104 GPU core based on Samsung's 8nm process node. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is a bigger upgrade over its non-Ti brother than the RTX 3080 Ti, offering both increase cores and a faster VRAM configuration. Following are the specifications.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Graphics Card Specifications

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti on the other hand is going to feature the GA104-400-A1 GPU.  The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti will utilize the PG141-SKU10 board. The Ampere GPU will feature 6144 CUDA cores or 48 SMs. These are 4% more CUDA cores than the GeForce RTX 3070 & around 30% lower cores than the GeForce RTX 3080. The card features clock speeds of 1580 MHz base & 1770 MHz boost.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti will also feature 8 GB GDDR6X memory and what's important here is the fact that NVIDIA is utilizing the higher-grade GDDR6X chips rather than the standard GDDR6 modules featured on the existing GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti will end up close to the RTX 3080 with a TGP of 290W considering the increased cores & the newer memory modules. The card will retain a 256-bit bus interface and pin speeds will be rated at 19 Gbps like the GeForce RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is expected to launch by the start of June for an MSRP of around $599 US. As for design, the graphics card is rocking a slightly updated Founders Edition cooler. The standard RTX 3070 comes with a single 8-pin connector while the RTX 3070 Ti rocks a 12-pin micro-fit power interface and also a brand new PCB design which is similar to the irregular PCB designs featured on the RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3090.

The graphics card also features a flow-through design vs the dual-fan cooler on the non-Ti variant. Display outputs include the standard 1 HDMI 2.1 & triple DP 2.0 interfaces. The card will officially be launching on 10th June.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Product Gallery & PCB Shots:

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture deep dive and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition review, head over to this link.

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture deep dive and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition review, head over to this link.

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