Nvidia RTX 3070 review: AMD’s stopwatch just started ticking a lot louder - Ars Technica

Talking about the RTX 3070, Nvidia's latest $499 GPU launching Thursday, October 29, is tricky in terms of the timing of today's review embargo.

Yet without AMD nipping at its heels, Nvidia's annoying strategy seemed to be the right call: the company established the RTX series' exclusive bonus processing cores as a major industry option without opposition, then got to wait a full year before competing with significant power jumps and delectable price cuts.

with the bonus of Nvidia's Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) for surprisingly competitive fidelity in 4K resolutions, should gamers upgrade their monitor between now and the next GPU generation.

In other words, if you're more interested in high frame rates on resolutions less than 4K, and you want GPU overkill for such a CPU-bound gaming scenario, the RTX 3070 is this year's best breathing-room option for the price...

Even though this year's $499 RTX 3070 clearly exceeds the power of last year's $699 RTX 2080 Super, I tested it against last year's $499 RTX 2070 Super as well to show exactly what a difference a year makes in terms of price-to-power proposition.

While Nvidia has made benchmarking claims that put the RTX 3070 ahead of the RTX 2080 Ti, that doesn't necessarily bear out in my testing—but this is because the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition shipped in 2018 with a remarkable capacity for safe overclocking.

The 3070 FE, like its 2070 Super sibling, seriously lacks headroom for such safe overclocking for either its core or memory clocks, as managed by tests-at-every-step automation by programs such as EVGA X1.

Remember: as Nvidia's Founders Editions go, generally, so do other vendors' variants.

Thus, the 2080 Ti still pulls ahead in most, but not all, of the above gaming benchmarks, whether ray tracing is or isn't enabled.

Categories like Tensor cores and RT cores are listed as "newer-generation" versions for the 3070, and the bigger 3000-series cards beat the 2080 Ti both in quantity and generation, so they get the clearer wins.

The 3070 finally sees that efficiency trade fail to win out in certain testing scenarios—nothing tragic, mind you, but worth noting in case you'd hoped for across-the-board wins against the 2080 Ti.

That's 184 "third-generation" Tensor cores in the 3070, versus 544 older Tensor cores in the 2080 Ti, and 46 "second-generation" RT cores in the 3070, versus 68 older RT cores in the 2080 Ti.