Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Beats 2080 Ti in First Performance Results

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A true price-vs-performance 2080 Ti killer

(Image credit: Nvidia)

It's a shame the RTX 3070 launch was delayed due to availability issues; however, that didn't stop Nvidia from hyping up it's RTX 3070 in its "RTX 3070 Availability" blog post with a new performance chart comparing the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2070 to the new 3070.

The new chart shows results from a mix of workloads, including games, benchmarks, and a few production apps. As Nvidia said in its keynote, the RTX 3070 is faster than the RTX 2080 Ti in almost every application listed in the company's performance results. The only exceptions are Control and Timespy Extreme, where the 2080 Ti is just a hair quicker. Meanwhile, the RTX 3070 demonstrates a 1.5x lead at the very minimum over the RTX 2070, with Blender being the only exception- the 3070 skyrocketed to over 2x.

RTX 3070 Performance Chart

RTX 3070 Performance Chart (Image credit: Nvidia)

Videocardz went all out on Nvidia's chart, measuring each pixel of each chart bar to get as razor accurate as possible. On average, the RTX 3070 was 8% faster than the 2080 Ti and 68% faster vs the 2070 according to their "pixel counting" measurements.

Take these results with a grain of salt, however; Nvidia has a habit of showing the best results from select games and applications that might not be indicative of real-world performance. On the bright side, if performance is this good when the card launches, the RTX 3070 could be a real bargain at the $500 price point. But with RDNA2 cards being revealed at the exact same time, it might be wise to wait and see if those cards offer better performance-per-dollar before dropping your hard-earned cash on a RTX 3070.

The launch for the RTX 3070 has been pushed out to October 29th, so stay tuned for our review of the Founders Edition during that time.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

43 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Shadowclash10
    This is... pretty promising. Bear in mind that this is from Nvidia, as TH pointed out. On the other hand, games haven't been optimized for it yet, drivers, etc.

    I wonder why the 2080Ti was slightly faster in Control?
    Reply
  • Thomas Wells
    Who cares, there won't actually be any of these cards available at launch anyway. They only did the 30 series launch when they did so they could make sure they beat AMD projected dates. Typical Nvidia BS
    Reply
  • tomachas
    I'll get one several months later and scalpels can have 5 each one of them. I just don't know what they going to do with them in the end :)
    Reply
  • Chrys
    108% faster or 8% faster?
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    Chrys said:
    108% faster or 8% faster?

    Thank you! Fixing that now. :)
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    Shadowclash10 said:
    This is... pretty promising. Bear in mind that this is from Nvidia, as TH pointed out. On the other hand, games haven't been optimized for it yet, drivers, etc.

    I wonder why the 2080Ti was slightly faster in Control?

    Yeah I'm not sure I found it very strange. Especially with RTX enabled, it should be faster. I suspect they were not using DLSS and as a result, the 8GB frame buffer was being maxed out because ray tracing will use more vram vs regular lighting techniques.

    However, DLSS should significantly reduce vram consumption, since you're reducing the render resolution by more than 2x, so this should not be a problem at all if you use DLSS. Running Control on my RTX 2060 Super with everything maxed out at 3440x1440 with DLSS at 720P (performance mode) i couldn't get my vram usage above 6GB.
    Reply
  • Chung Leong
    Shadowclash10 said:
    I wonder why the 2080Ti was slightly faster in Control?

    The 2080Ti has more tensor cores than the 3070. The 3070 could be hitting a limit when DLSS is used.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    Yeah... gonna wait for actual reviews on this one.
    They lied about the 3080, this won't be any different.
    Those people who panic-sold their 2080Tis... :kikou:
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    On average, the RTX 3070 was 8% faster than the 2080 Ti...
    Keep in mind, that's not an average for gaming performance, but for a mix of games, rendering software and the TimeSpy benchmark, and the rendering software is clearly throwing off the results. If we ignore the rendering software, that works out to only about a 3% difference. And of course, half of those games have RTX and DLSS upscaling active, and we know from reviews of the other Ampere cards that Doom Eternal is a major outlier not indicative of typical performance in other games. So, it looks like, on average, the 3070 will likely tend to be slightly slower than a 2080 Ti in most of today's games. With future games heavily utilizing RT it might manage to be slightly faster, but the Control results indicate that's not necessarily a given for AAA titles heavily utilizing RT effects.

    TechyInAZ said:
    Yeah I'm not sure I found it very strange. Especially with RTX enabled, it should be faster. I suspect they were not using DLSS and as a result, the 8GB frame buffer was being maxed out because ray tracing will use more vram vs regular lighting techniques.

    However, DLSS should significantly reduce vram consumption, since you're reducing the render resolution by more than 2x, so this should not be a problem at all if you use DLSS. Running Control on my RTX 2060 Super with everything maxed out at 3440x1440 with DLSS at 720P (performance mode) i couldn't get my vram usage above 6GB.
    Actually, they were in fact using DLSS upscaling for all of the RT games listed. According to the fine print at the bottom of the chart...

    Game performance measured at 1440p, highest game settings, i9. RTX ON is RT+DLSS.
    Reply
  • HyperMatrix
    Guys, please don’t buy the marketing on this. If you noticed in the chart, Nvidia stuck several rendering applications in there because Ampere rt cores provide a massive boost over Turing for that function. And the very few games they showed are a best case scenario for the 3070.

    On average in gaming, assuming no VRAM limitations come into play, the 3070 will be 15-25% SLOWER than the 2080Ti. Think of it this way:

    Nvidia claims 3070 is 8% faster than 2080Ti.
    But we know the 3080 24% faster than the 2080Ti in actual gaming (average of 15 popular games, techpowerup)
    We know that The 3080 has 50% more cores than the 3070
    We also know the 3080 has 60% more memory bandwidth than the 3070
    So if, for example, the 2080Ti gets 100fps, the 3080 gets 124fps. And since the performance of the 3080 is AT LEAST 50% higher than the 3070 (due to having 50% more CUDA cores and 60% more bandwidth), that means we can extrapolate the performance of the 3070 to be on average no higher than 124/1.5 = 82 FPS. It’ll likely be even worse than that because the ratio of memory bandwidth to CUDA cores is even worse on the 3070. But we’ll stick to the best case scenario. So the 3070 will be 18% slower than the 2080Ti. Or...the 2080Ti will be 21% faster than the 3070.

    The numbers will be a bit higher for the 3070 in RT bound situations and lower in VRAM limited situations. But please don’t buy into this marketing garbage.
    Reply