After months of rumors and speculation, Nvidia has finally unveiled its new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti card. The American technology company did so at the Computex show, which was held mostly online this year due to the COVID-19 epidemic.
This, though, has not prevented plenty of gamers from getting excited about Nvidia’s new graphics card, which is a step up from the earlier GeForce RTX 3070, which launched in October last year.
The key differences here are the card’s memory, which while staying the same at 8 GB, is of the GDDR6X variety instead of the GDDR6 memory found in the GeForce RTX 3070. This should give an edge to the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti when it comes to gaming, delivering faster frame rates, while the Ti also has 6144 CUDA cores (individual computing units which take care of graphics-related tasks) vs the 5888 found in the vanilla, non-Ti RTX 3070.
Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti will be launching on June 10, and will be priced at $599 US dollars as PC Gamer reports.
Going back to the card’s specs, the difference between the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 does not seem so great on paper, while both cards use the same 256 bit memory bus too, meaning the difference in performance might not be so great after all.
There’s also the fact that the upcoming Ti model will draw more power than the vanilla RTX 3070. One of the key advantages of the RTX 3070 vs the higher-end GeForce RTX 3080 was that it consumed significantly less power than its sibling, but this advantage might be gone if the RTX 3070 Ti power consumption is in the range of 250 and 275 Watts and the Ti doesn’t deliver the extra performance to justify the additional power consumption as TechRadar has pointed out.
Aside from unveiling the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti at Computex, Nvidia also showcased the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, an upgrade of last year’s RTX 3080.
The Ti boasts more memory (12 GB of GDRR6X vs 10 GB in the vanilla card) and significantly more CUDA cores (10496 vs 8704) while also using the same 384 bit memory bus.
This seems more of an upgrade to the non-Ti model than the RTX 3070 Ti is, an indeed early reviews have pointed this out. Bear in mind, though, that the RTX 3080 Ti costs $1200 US dollars, while the RTX 3080 will hurt your wallet much less as it has a MSRP of $699.
The thing here is that until benchmarks for the upcoming RTX 3070 Ti are available we won’t know whether this will be a better choice than the RTX 3080 or the RTX 3070, as the RTX 3070 Ti is priced between these two cards at $599 US dollars (the vanilla, non-Ti RTX 3070 is priced at $499).
Of course, taking into account the GPU shortage due to the pandemic and the fact that bitcoin has set new price records this year, and also that bitcoin miners have been grabbing tons of Nvidia cards to use in their mining operations, the chance is that you won’t be able to pick up any of these cards at their manufacturer suggested retail prices, or at all.
Time will tell, then, whether the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti becomes gamers’ card of choice or whether it turns out to be a pointless upgrade to the RTX 3070, arguably one of Nvidia’s best cards to date and a worthy upgrade for those who are still gaming on older cards like the GTX 970 or GTX 1650.
There’s also competition from AMD of course, and its Radeon 6000 line of graphics cards which are now catching up with Nvidia when it comes to power, even if the company headed by Jensen Huang is still king of the hill, and even more so with the likes of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and the upcoming RXT 3070 Ti being added to its range of gaming cards this year.
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GeForce 30 series graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)