Similar or Faster Than RTX 2080Ti?
That's what NVIDIA said when regarding what to expect from the GeForce RTX 3070 and, well, they were right. It's been a somewhat expected trend over past launches; the GTX 970 was similar to the 780Ti, the GTX 1070 was similar to the GTX 980Ti and so forth but they never quite matched the previous-gen top dog Ti part, until now. The GeForce RTX 3070 delivers on the promise that NVIDIA made and managed to do it on the smaller tier GA104 die and with lower memory bandwidth to boot.
The card itself comes in a fair bit more compact package fitting that 2080Ti performance in an RTX 2070 overall package, but with a much smaller PCB design allowing for the flow-through heatsink design to be carried over from the bigger GA102 designed cards of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Can I point out one major complaint is the fact that the GeForce logo doesn't light up? Seriously, come on guys.
The new cooler design does allow for the card to run very cool, much cooler than expected for the unusually high 220w TDP for a 70 class series card. The GeForce RTX 3070 does retain the now expected 12pin connector but only needs a solid 8-pin to be plugged in. I did ask NVIDIA if there was any harm in using a dual 8-pin to 12-pin adapter because most of the modular PSU cables plug into dual 8-pin on the PSU itself and they assured me there was no issue. But on a side note, I did borrow a dual 8-pin to 12-pin adapter and found myself able to push the core to the 2100MHz mark with ease, so I imagine there's quite some headroom on those overbuilt aftermarket cards you'll see reviews go up for soon enough.
The performance was absolutely solid. Want to pick the GeForce RTX 3070 for 1440p gaming? It'll kill it. Ultrawide 1440p? It'll kill that too. 4K? I would recommend stepping up a class but the 3070 will get you in the game if you're okay with dialing back some settings. You're going to find RTX enabled games running very well at the 1440p mark when paired with DLSS, especially if the game is one of the ever-growing titles that support DLSS 2.0 which is quite killer and upcoming games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Watchdogs Legions are titles you'll want to take advantage of the RTX suite with.
Features like AV1 might not be fully mainstream yet but the GeForce RTX 3070 carries support for it. And other features like the NVIDIA Broadcast suite are absolutely undeniable in the value department, but that one is available across a large swath of GeForce cards, but something worth mentioning still.
The elephant in the room here is the 8GB of VRAM. It's an understandable concern as this marks the 3rd generation where 8GB was the available VRAM for the 70 class card. I'm sure many were hoping to see more here and I don't blame them. But so far we haven't seen it be an issue at 1440p and even 4K as the results show. What we've found in many cases where it appears there may be a VRAM limited performance scenario we actually found it more likely that it was a bandwidth-limited situation and the gap closed off once the memory was overclocked.
Speaking of overclocking, while the core might not have moved much the memory on these cards is absolutely insane for overclocking. I had no issues pushing this card to +1250MHz memory resulting in a memory bandwidth of 528GB/s and while still less than the RTX 2080Ti's 620GB/s it's still impressive for a 256-bus card especially considering its stock bandwidth is the usual 448GB/s. But looking at the results it's clear the best performance comes from a combination of GPU core undervolting and memory overclocking.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 has raised the bar on what to expect in terms of performance at $499 for now. It's able to deliver high frame rate gaming at 1440p and Ultrawide 1440p while still being able to punch about in the 4K class. But its solid RTX feature support and performance all-around at 1440p keeps it firmly in the strong arm of the market for that highly coveted 1440p high refresh market.
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