The RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti add some updates to Nvidia’s wildly popular Ampere lineup. On paper, however, the 3070 Ti doesn’t look much different from the base 3070. It comes with more cores and a slight increase in clock speed, but it’s not the improvement we’ve come to expect from Nvidia.
Is it worth upgrading from RTX 3070 to RTX 3070 Ti? Or should you spend a little more and go for the 3080? We rounded up the RTX 3070 Ti, 3080 and 3070 to compare them and find out which is the best graphics card to choose in 2021.
Prices and availability
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Nvidia announced the RTX 3070 and 3080 on September 1, 2020, with the 3080 released on September 17 for $699 and the 3070 released on October 29 for $499. The 3070 Ti arrived shortly after the 3080 Ti on June 10, 2021 for $599.
Those prices don’t mean much. Currently, the RTX 3070 sells for around $1,300 on the used market, while the 3080 often sells for $2,000. Even if you’re lucky enough to get one of these cards from a source, you’ll be paying well above MSRP. Retailers sell RTX 3070 models for around $700 to $800, and the 3080 often goes for over $1,000.
This is due to the constant shortage of GPUs. Disruptions in manufacturing supply chains, increased demand from cryptocurrency miners, and tariffs on cards imported from China have contributed to low supply and high demand, leading to one thing — insanely high prices. Frankly, neither card is worth its price second-hand, and there’s an argument to be made that they’re not even worth their retail price.
Between the three, the RTX 3070 is the best value. At around $700, the 3070 is cheap enough that you’re not just throwing money away. But how much you pay will depend on which cards you find in stock and at what price.
Specifications and performance
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As the RTX 3080 Ti demonstrated, balance becomes an issue in the Ampera range. The RTX 3070 Ti only complicates things even more. It’s a marginal upgrade across the board, showing modest gains over the RTX 3070 while still falling well short of the RTX 3080’s specs. And with an extra $100 on the line — or likely a lot more given the GPU market — the RTX 3070 Ti doesn’t doesn’t do enough to set itself apart.
| RTX 3070 Ti | RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | |
| GPU | GA104-400-A1 | GA102-200-KD-A1 | GA104-300-A1 |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 4.0 |
| CUDA cores | 6,144 | 8,704 | 5,888 |
| Tensor kernels | 192 | 272 | 184 |
| RT core | 48 | 68 | 46 |
| Basic class | 1.575 MHz | 1440 MHz | 1,500 MHz |
| Turn up the clock | 1.770 MHz | 1.710 MHz | 1.725 MHz |
| Memory | 8 GB GDDR6X | 10 GB GDDR6X | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory speed | 1.188 MHz | 1.188 MHz | 1.750 MHz |
| Band width | 608 GBps | 760 GBps | 448 GBps |
| Memory bus | 256-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit |
| TDP | 290 W | 320 W | 220 W |
Let’s start with the marginal improvements. The 3070 Ti comes with 256 more CUDA cores, eight more Tensor cores and two more RT cores compared to the base 3070. It also has a slight increase in clock speed, which comes into play after slightly overclocking the GPU. The biggest improvement is in memory. Although the 3070 Ti still comes with 8GB, it uses GDDR6X memory, which can achieve much higher bandwidth on the same 256-bit bus.
The specs don’t tell the whole story, but they do offer a synopsis. The 3070 Ti does very little to set itself apart from the 3070. It’s certainly a more powerful card, but you shouldn’t jump into selling your RTX 3070 thinking you’re getting a significant upgrade.
Early benchmarks show that. Across a range of synthetic tools, the 3070 Ti offers up to a 10% performance boost over the 3070, and that gap is also visible in gaming. In context, the RTX 3080 managed to achieve up to 40% better performance in the same benchmark suite.
Overall, the RTX 3080 destroys the other two cards. A quick look at the spec sheet shows this, and our real-world testing confirms it. The 3080 is a powerful 4K capable of delivering more than 60 frames per second (fps) in demanding AAA games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Battlefield V. The 3070 and 3070 Ti can run these games at 4K, but you’ll need to go to 1440p to see similar frame rates.
The real question is whether 10% is worth $100 or more. Considering Nvidia’s prices, the 3070 Ti should perform about 20% higher than the 3070 and 20% lower than the 3080, which is not the case. In this three-way battle, there are really only two possibilities. If you already have an RTX 3070 and want to upgrade, go for the RTX 3080. If you don’t have a card yet and are deciding between the three, it comes down to the 3070 and 3080.
That’s assuming you’ll spend the same price for the 3070 and 3070 Ti though. If the difference between the two is $100 or more—it’s hard to tell because used prices fluctuate all the time—you can save some money with the 3070 or spend a little more for the 3080.
LHR and ray tracing
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One of the reasons why Nvidia graphics cards are so expensive is the demand for cryptocurrency mining. Fortunately, Nvidia has a solution. The RTX 3070 Ti, 3070 and 3080 come with a Lite Hash Rate (LHR) GPU core. This GPU core provides identical performance while capping Ethereum’s hash rate, which should help reduce miner demand. If you’re a miner yourself, you might want to consider an AMD card.
All three cards also come with Nvidia’s RTX features. The first part of the RTX package is hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Each of the cards uses dedicated ray tracing cores to render reflections and shadows at the photon level, adding a new level of realism to supported games.
The problem is that ray tracing is extremely demanding, and that’s where another RTX feature comes into play — deep learning super sampling (DLSS). DLSS uses AI to upscale games from low resolution internal rendering. Instead of rendering a game in 4K, for example, DLSS renders a game in 1080p and upscales it to 4K without much loss in image quality.
The RTX package is one of the main reasons to buy an Nvidia card instead of an AMD one. And luckily, all three of our competitors deliver.
Two real options
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This comparison really boils down to the RTX 3080 versus one of the 3070s. Between the 3070 and 3070 Ti, the extra cost of the Ti variant isn’t worth it. However, you can find those two cards for about the same price, in which case the 3070 Ti is a slightly stronger card.
Under normal circumstances, the 3070 Ti would be an unnecessary addition to the Ampere line. It offers a bit more performance, but nothing that justifies its price. However, these are not normal circumstances. If there’s one thing the 3070 Ti does well, it’s delivering more cards to market, and that’s what matters right now. We just don’t recommend paying a significant premium for the 3070 Ti over the 3070.
The 3080 complicates things a bit. It’s the best card in the series by a significant margin, but it also sells for a lot more. If you can find one for a reasonable price – under or around $1,000 at the moment – that’s the best option.
Editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn