Nvidia's new super-powered graphics cards have arrived, as they do, without any fanfare in the gaming community, especially the company's flagship RTX 3080 and 3090 cards. These high-end GPUs do magic things for an ultimate 4K gaming rig, but they also cost a ton. $700 for the 3080 and a whopping $1500 for the 3090.
However, if you're at the console's new price of $500 and are tired of trying to buy one – or just love PC gaming – the RTX 3070 is a much more comfortable bet with little significant compromise.
There's a lot to like about the 3070. The card uses the same Ampere GA104 GPU as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, if not quite as beefy for obvious reasons. This ensures that the card offers the various new and awesome bells and whistles of the RTX line. Specifically, the highlights are ray tracing and Nvidia's impressive DLSS AI tech to improve frame rates (in some cases quite dramatically).
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 Review: Gaming Power
To put things in a more direct perspective, for $200 less than the RTX 3080, the 3070 often turns out to be a much better performer than last year's $2080 RTX 1000 Ti. The 3070 lets you push past 1080P to achieve extreme detail at 1440P and, for now anyway, delivers extremely good 4K performance.
Granted, while 4K HDTVs are certainly quite common, PC monitors reaching that level aren't nearly as ubiquitous.
For games like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Gears of War 5, frame rates at 1440p are well over 100fps in our tests. Fortnite with DLSS performance mode enabled on shots over 200fps and in quality mode it was close behind that number.
Other games with well-tested engines like Control and Metro Exodus benefit hugely from Nvidia's DLSS technology. Checking in 4K with full detail and ray tracing, for example, is a slideshow without it (vat sometimes as low as 12+/-fps). With DLSS enabled, the game holds at around 60 frames per second. At 1440p, however, that same very detailed DLSS with ray tracing hits close to 100 fps for control.
Another surprising perk comes with Minecraft. Nvidia has worked diligently to create a truly incredible showcase for the powers of ray tracing in sandbox gaming. Right now, even though the feature is officially supported and out of beta, it's still only available on specific cards labeled RTX. The effects, however, are magnificent. Liquid lighting and effects look ethereal, adding a level of intense atmosphere to the maps.
Nvidia has proven its reliability in updating its drivers to adapt to new versions. As a result, we expect the 3070 to have an exceptional level of performance in most upcoming games, even if the gains aren't as high as seen in the 3080.
Testing the 3070 with 3D Mark yielded impressive results. We installed the card in an Acer Predator Orion 5000, which sports an Intel i7-8700K processor and 16GB of RAM. Results for 3D Mark's Time Spy benchmark ranked as "Excellent" with a score of 11 (or better than 153% of all results according to 91DMark statistics). So, from a purely comparative standpoint, the 3 is no slouch.
Honestly, stress test framerates aren't necessarily the best way to express video card performance. Even with a dedicated 4K resolution, it proved unlikely to find an unplayable game on the 3070 after some minor tweaks to some of the game's graphics settings. For gamers who are still good with 1080P, the 3070 is definitely the new card. to be obtained, delivering extremely high performance at HD resolution without compromise.
There are a few other reasons to consider the 3070 over the 3080.
It uses about 100 watts less than the 3080, for one thing, so cooling is a bit easier (and quieter). Nvidia recommends a minimum 650 watt power supply to drive the card.
The 3070 also has a smaller footprint, at just over 9 inches long (as opposed to the 3080, which is just under 12 inches). This means it fits more comfortably in a wide range of cases, so those with more compact rigs will find this a better choice. The RTX 3070 also has three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port, allowing it to handle up to four monitors if needed.
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 Review – The Bottom Line
Benefits
- $200 cheaper than the next line card
- Better than last year's top-end RTX 2080
- DLSS technology makes ray tracing and extreme graphic effects smooth and beautiful
- Smaller footprint, less power consumption, many monitor ports make it suitable for a variety of cases
The inconvenients
- $500 is still a lot of money
- 8GB of RAM could be an issue for future 4K games
- If you're only playing 4K, probably go the extra $200 for at least the 3080
The general rule for building and upgrading a gaming PC is to get as much power as you can afford. No matter how you look at it, however, spending anywhere from $500 to over $1 on a single component is still painful. So for those looking for the middle ground between price and super high-end performance, Nvidia's RTX 000 is a standout video card.
As it stands, the Nvidia RTX 3070 is the best mid-range card on the market. It easily outperforms anything AMD currently has in this price range and comes close enough to high-end cards that it doesn't feel like a painful compromise.
For 1440p and 1080p, this card smokes everything we threw at it, with all the detail and ray tracing thanks in part, at times, to Nvidia's DLSS. For 4K this has always proven to be an outstanding card and our main caveat might be that with only 8GB of onboard RAM it's conceivable that new games in the next year or so will require visual downgrades.
Admittedly, even the RTX 3080 for $200 more could have this issue since it only has 10GB. But whether that will matter at all in the next few years is hard to say.
[Note: Nvidia provided the RTX 3070 GPU used for this review.]
