Review: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition

Introduction

Announced at the same time as the higher-performing Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, less attention was focused on the RTX 3070 Ti. Retailing at $599/£529 - but good luck in finding any cards at that price - this model improves upon its non-Ti namesake in a couple of noteworthy ways, illustrated in the table below.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Analysis

The Ti model uses the full power of the second-rung GA104 Ampere die, translating to a design with 48 SMs, or two more than the non-Ti, Crunching the numbers reveals commensurately more shaders, RT Cores and Tensor Cores. Nvidia also takes the opportunity to increase base and boost frequencies by a small amount. The net result is an extra seven per cent shading power adjudged by comparing RTX 3070 Series Founders Editions cards to one another.

Hardly much to get excited about, you would think. Nvidia knows that it can't add to the shader-core count without moving to a larger, more expensive die so does the next best thing by increasing the performance of the memory subsystem. It's still 8GB running across a 256-bit bus, which feels eminently stingy for a premium GPU in 2021 - but now uses 19Gbps-rated GDDR6X memory instead of 14Gbps GDDR6. The move is an easy one to make as the faster GDDR6X memory is already present in the RTX 3080/Ti GPUs.

Cranking up the frequency realises some impressive on-paper gains. There's 36 per cent more bandwidth that ought to come in useful at higher resolutions and image-quality settings. There's no free lunch, however, as increasing the number of cores and utilising speedier memory cause the overall power consumption to rise significantly.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti runs with a 290W TGP, up from 220W - a whopping 32 per cent increase - so it is very likely that Nvidia's partners building these GPUs will use RTX 3080-optimised cooling instead of smaller cards we sometimes see in the RTX 3070/3060 Ti firmament.

In effect, Nvidia is using a brute-force approach to uplift RTX 3070 performance by up to 10 per cent. This move ought to put the new Ti at around rival Radeon RX 6800 levels, albeit with half the graphics memory. We have no qualms about how Nvidia has gone about constructing this specific GPU from a frequency point of view, but we'd have released the RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB of memory, using double-density modules, in the name of futureproofing. The only reason for not doing so rests with power because GDDR6X memory operating at 19Gbps is known to be power hungy.

Now we know how it's built, let's take a look at the Founders Edition model before running the benchmarks.