Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition

RTX 2080 Ti performance at half the price?

- JARRED WALTON

THE GEFORCE RTX 3070 is round three of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. All of the core features are present, and yet Nvidia dials things back quite a bit from the earlier outings. We weren’t expecting RTX 3090 levels of performance for $500. Still, having seen what the RTX 3080 and 3090 bring to the table, this is definitely a big step down.

In a vacuum, the 3070 basically delivers RTX 2080 Ti performance at half the price, which sounds like a bargain. But the 3080 has 70 percent more memory bandwidth and 45 percent more theoretical computational power, and ends up beating the 3070 by about 35 percent overall. It also costs 40 percent more, but nearly linear scaling of performance with price is far better than the usual diminishing returns we see at the top of the GPU stack—just look at the 3090, which more than doubles the 3080’s price for only 15 percent more performance.