The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition And It’s GuaranTied UnavailabiliTi

Too Late, You Missed It … But Should You Care

Component prices are a painful thing to discuss right now, especially for GPUs as the listed MSRP is as mythical as fire breathing unicorn’s pot of gold.  However in the case of the RTX 3070 Ti, we must once again live through the awful experience of discussing the price a GPU should sell for as it is a major point of contention on this release.

In a world with a limited supply of cryptocreeps and little limit on GPU availability the RTX 3070 Ti FE would cost you $600*.  That is $100* less than an RTX 3080 FE and $100* more than an RTX 3070, which seems reasonable when looked at in isolation.  Unfortunately there are other theoretical GPUs, the RX 6800 for $30* less and the RTX 6800 XT for $50* more than the RTX 3070 Ti FE.  It is also worth mentioning that the RTX 2080 Ti FE launched at $1200 for reasons which will become obvious.

When you look at our review of the RTX 3070 Ti Fe you will see that the card is about 10% faster than a non-Ti RTX 3070 for an extra 20% MSRP* and about 20% slower than the RTX 3080 FE for a hair under 17% more*.   The math on that sucks, but not as badly as when you compare it to AMD’s offerings.  For a savings of $30* you get a better card, as the RX 6800 beats the new RTX 3070 Fe in rasterized testing.  If you scrape up an extra $50* you can get a card about 20% faster in raster games, or to put it another way, performance more or less equal to the RTX 3080 FE.  Again, the math does not look good at all.

However, there is something the RTX 3070 Fe can do which neither Navi card can, which is take advantage of ray tracing.  As you can see at The FPS Review when you bring ray tracing into it then the AMD cards both fall behind the new GA104 Ampere card.  The problem is that the math on the RTX 3080 and 3070 doesn’t change at all when you look at ray tracing and you are once again left with the percentage differences we saw in rasterized performance.

There is one way you can look at this release which does make the price* and performance of the RTX 3070 Ti FE look a bit better.  If you compare it to the RTX 2080 Ti FE then the new card is a deal* as it provides equal or better performance for half the price … except for one small problem.   That old RTX 2080 Ti FE shipped with 11GB of RAM, maybe not GDDR6X but certainly better than the 8GB of the RTX 3070 Ti FE.   Pity both the AMD cards mentioned sport double that amount.

The non-FE cards below offer similar results, with slightly different flavouring thanks to interesting power and cooling solutions.

* I’m tired of writing theoretical and other synonyms thereof at this point