GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
Nvidia’s latest Ti takes aim at AMD’s RX 6800, reveals Jacob Ridley.
Nvidia’s latest Ti takes aim at AMD’s RX 6800, reveals Jacob Ridley.
There’s a hole in the GeForce line-up and the new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is the card with which Nvidia hopes to plug it up. Prior to the RTX 3070 Ti’s release it was a space wholly occupied by AMD’s Radeon RX 6800, which is perhaps why Nvidia sees it a vital gap to fill as quickly as possible. It aims to do so with a blend of the RTX 3070’s full GPU and the RTX 3080’s speedy memory, all combined in one card, which will deliver high frame-rate 1440p and more “affordable” 4K gaming.
First off, there’s the GA104 GPU. The RTX 3070 Ti uses the complete, uncut GPU only currently found within the mobile RTX 3080. It’s confusing. Nonetheless, what will be key to desktop PC gamers is that this is a slightly more performant version of the GA104 GPU. It achieves this extra power with a moderate CUDA Core increase: 6,144 on the RTX 3070 Ti to the 5,888 on the RTX 3070. You can also expect boost clocks to officially top 1,770MHz with the RTX 3070 Ti, which is a little higher than the 1,725MHz found on the RTX 3070 Founders Edition.
Passing on any significant shake-up in the GPU silicon, Nvidia has instead seen fit to equip the RTX 3070 Ti with GDDR6X memory. This sees the RTX 3070 Ti arrive with 608GB/s, a notable improvement on the RTX 3070’s 448GB/s, despite both featuring an identical 256-bit wide memory bus.
GDDR6X’s secret is PAM4 signalling, which effectively doubles the number of signals the memory transmits with each clock. It’s not quite doubly effective in practice, but it has enabled its manufacturer, Micron, to deliver 19Gbps with GDDR6X, while GDDR6 manages just 14Gbps.
Two sides to every story
Nvidia has opted for a new Founders Edition shroud with the RTX 3070 Ti, that has made it possible for Nvidia to mount a single fan on both sides of the card. Nvidia calls this ‘flow-through cooling’ and it’s something you’ll spot on the RTX 3080 and above too. There are also more heatpipes than the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, with a total of six running through the RTX 3070 Ti.
This cooler redesign seems to be essential to the internal overhaul. With a tougher job of keeping the RTX 3070 Ti’s components cool, the card ends up reaching higher temperatures under load than expected: 75°C on average across three 4K gaming runs.
It’s a given, then, that the RTX 3070 Ti consumes more power from the PSU than the RTX 3070. And does so by some margin. The RTX 3070 comes with a TDP of 220W while the RTX 3070 Ti demands 290W.
Generally, 4K gaming enjoys memory bandwidth, and comparatively the RTX 3070 Ti has that in swathes compared to the RTX 3070. It’s a card more naturally inclined to the demanding Ultra HD resolution, but importantly it’s also able to offer a little more bandwidth than the RX 6800: 608GB/s to its competitor’s 512GB/s. This translates into better 4K gaming performance across the board versus the AMD RX 6800, though using a good bit more power to do so.
Reducing the resolution to 1440p tends to eliminate the advantage the 3070 Ti has with its superior memory bandwidth and sees the RX 6800 draw level in performance terms. Reducing this further to 1080p gives the AMD card a full advantage again.
The RTX 3070 Ti is the result of pushing the GA104 silicon to its limit. Power demands are high, despite a not altogether massive improvement in clock speed or CUDA Core count. Despite a solid 1440p and relaxed 4K result, you might want to pick up the cheaper, cooler and only slightly slower Nvidia RTX 3070 instead.