Better than 2080 Ti? RTX 3070 Benchmarks Hit Geekbench

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 launches next Thursday, assuming you can get your hands on one, meaning that performance numbers are starting to leak. Up until now, we've had to rely on official charts from Nvidia, but the Geekbench Browser, which users can anonymously upload their benchmark results to, found itself with two new RTX 3070 results late last night. 

These tests were performed with Geekbench 4.0 rather than the newer Geekbench 5.0, but these numbers are still plenty relevant, and the use of an older benchmark actually makes it easier to compare these results with those of older GPUs.

Both tests were performed on what appears to be the same system, meaning we have two trials here rather than a comparison of how the RTX 3070 runs on different CPUs. The system uses an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of DDR4 SDRAM and of course has an RTX 3070 with 8GB of memory for its GPU (though we’re not sure which manufacturer it comes from).

The results? One of the tests has an OpenCL score of 359,349 while the other has an OpenCL score of 350,093. We’re not sure what order these tests were performed in.

We first stumbled across these results thanks to Apisak on Twitter. The top (and currently only) reply to Apisak’s thread also took the liberty of answering the burning question on everyone's mind by checking these results against existing benchmarks for the 2080 Ti, which they found normally runs in the 345k-355k range. When we checked ourselves, we found this does appear to be the case on the Geekbench Browser at least, though there are outliers that are both significantly higher and lower than the RTX 3070’s scores.

We should note that it’s difficult to put much weight behind any one single test, as benchmarks vary from system to system based on factors like CPU, cooling and even form factor. But the general trend, both from these new RTX 3070 benchmarks and from the official Nvidia numbers released late last month, is that the RTX 3070 tends to perform slightly better than the RTX 2080 Ti, which would likely make it one of the best graphics cards and put it in a strong position in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

And that’s good news, even if the new card’s performance gains aren’t too hefty. That’s because the RTX 3070 is set to start at just $500, which is significantly cheaper than most RTX 2080 Ti listings, which go for more than $1000 even 2 years after its release.

Of course, we still have a small sample size to work with, and official Nvidia numbers are likely to be biased. We can’t say for sure how well the RTX 3070 performs until we publish our official review. But going off preliminary testing, it seems like catching up to today’s top-performers will soon be far more affordable -- assuming inventory catches up to demand.