Yesterday NVIDIA announced the much-anticipated GeForce RTX 30 series which is based on its Ampere architecture and built on an optimized version of Samsung’s 8nm process.
The cards have been heavily leaked over recent weeks and we knew there had been lots of claims of increased performance and we also knew that NVIDIA were going to charge some crazy prices for the top of the range RTX 3090.
However, what was not expected was that NVIDIA would claim that GeForce RTX 3070 should offer RTX 2080 Ti level performance for just $499/£470
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Performance claims
NVIDIA has claimed that the GeForce RTX 30 series biggest generational leap ever
NVIDIA claims that the new GeForce RTX 3070 is 60% faster on average than the GeForce RTX 2070. That means it is faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the previous flagship model.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 is 50% more powerful than Titan RTX!
As for the models higher up in the range – NVIDIA says the RTX 3090 is 50% more powerful than the Titan RTX, and that the card is able to deliver 60fps at 8K. Then there’s the RTX 3080, which offers double the level of performance of the RTX 2080 for the same price.
All of this sounds amazing and if true the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 will easily be the sweet spot for most gamers offering the best price to performance ratio. I don’t think many gamers feel that the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti underperforms in any game regardless of resolution and refresh rate.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 won’t beat the RTX 2080 Ti in some scenarios
There are some caveats though, the RTX 3070 won’t beat the RTX 2080 Ti in all scenarios, in particular, if you do play at 4K and want the benefits of ray tracing you may have to go higher.
For specific scenarios, the larger amount of RAM in the 2018 graphics card could handle higher resolution better. The RTX 3070 is said to support 4K gaming at 60 frames per second, but it won’t handle that rate with ray tracing on.
NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison
| RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | RTX 2080 Ti | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CUDA Cores | 10496 | 8704 | 5888 | 4352 |
| Boost Clock | 1.7GHz | 1.71GHz | 1.73GHz | 1545MHz |
| Memory Clock | 19.5Gbps GDDR6X | 19Gbps GDDR6X | 16Gbps GDDR6 | 14Gbps GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus Width | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit |
| VRAM | 24GB | 10GB | 8GB | 11GB |
| Single Precision Perf. | 35.7 TFLOPs | 29.8 TFLOPs | 20.4 TFLOPs | 13.4 TFLOPs |
| Tensor Perf. (FP16) | 285 TFLOPs | 238 TFLOPs | 163 TFLOPs | 114 TFLOPs |
| Ray Perf. | 69 TFLOPs | 58 TFLOPs | 40 TFLOPs | ? |
| TDP | 350W | 320W | 220W | 250W |
| GPU | GA102? | GA102? | GA104? | TU102 |
| Transistor Count | 28B | 28B | ? | 18.6B |
| PCIe Interface | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 x16 | 3.0 x16 |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere | Ampere | Turing |
| Manufacturing Process | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | TSMC 12nm FFN |
| Launch Date | 24th September | 17th of September | October 2020 | 20th September 2018 |
| Launch Price | MSRP: $1499/£1399 | MSRP: $699/£649 | MSRP: $499/£469 | MSRP: $999 |
Currently, we only have NVIDIA’s word on the performance, but looking at the specification, we can see that the new RTX 30 series models offer a huge bump in performance numbers with the RTX 3070 eclipsing the RTX 2080 Ti in every spec apart from the memory size.
Price and Availability
Nvidia is launching the RTX 3070 last, perhaps to avoid eager gamers opting for this over the RTX 3080 (which is what I may end up doing). It will launch sometime in October for $499/£469, for custom cards from the likes of ASUS the prices will vary depending on the design.
The first card to launch will be the RTX 3080 on the 17th of September for $699/£649 then shortly after the RTX 3090 for an astronomical $1499/£1399
