It’s been almost two years since Nvidia launched its previous line of graphics cards, and now the company led by Jensen Huang is getting ready to launch its new GeForce 30 series. The highlight of this is arguably the GeForce RTX 3070, which will be hitting shelves this October as was recently reported on bit-tech.net.
Unlike its two more powerful relatives (the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090), though, the RTX 3070 will use slower GDDR6 memory as opposed to the GDDR6X memory found in the other series 30 cards. Also, the card comes with 8 GB of memory, while the top of the range RTX 3090 boasts a massive 24 GB of memory. Meanwhile the RTX 3080 sports 10 GB of GDDR6X memory.
But despite its slower memory, the GeForce RTX 3070 will still outpace the RTX 2080 Ti, Nvidia’s previous flagship card which is still going for more than $1200 US dollars. And yet the RTX 3070 will be priced at a very reasonable $499, making it the card to get for those looking to turbocharge their PC this year.
This is thanks to the RTX 3070 speedy CUDA cores (essentially parallel computing units which take care of graphics processing), with the card boasting 5,888 of these in tandem with its 8 GB of fast GDDR6 memory.
Actually, Nvidia has said that the RTX 3070 is the “sweet spot”, offering the best deal when it comes to price vs performance, while the other two cards in the range, the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are aimed at enthusiast PC users.
As stated earlier, the RTX 3070 will launch this October (on the 15th), while the other two cards will be arriving in September: the RTX 3080 is coming on September 17, while the RTX 3090 will be hitting the shelves on September 24.
But judging by early reviews of the RTX 3080, it appears that the GeForce 30 series is indeed a big generational leap as Nvidia itself has claimed, with the likes of HotHardware calling the card a “gaming monster”.
These new batch of cards based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture should also make the use of ray tracing in video games a more realistic proposition. It seems the earlier series 20 cards such as the RTX 2070 were slightly underpowered for ray tracing, so it’s a good thing that the RTX 3070 can outperform a RTX 2080 Ti, paving the road for higher quality graphics in PC games.
The RTX 3070 might remind some of Nvidia’s earlier GeForce GTX 970, which was also a game changer in late 2014 by offering smashing performance at a very reasonable price, while also outpacing everything the competition had to offer (actually, a GTX 970 is still happily chugging along in one of my PCs).
So the arrival of the RTX 3070 will certainly be good news for those who were waiting to upgrade their PC’s graphics card with something significantly more powerful, which might be a good idea taking into account how next-gen games will likely be taking advantage of hot new graphical features such as ray tracing, while also running at 4K resolutions (and higher).
It remains to be seen, though, whether Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 will truly be the card of choice for those who don’t want to splash the extra on the RTX 3080 (or the high end RTX 3090), something we’ll find out when the RTX 3070 arrives next month, on October 15.
GeForce series 30 graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)