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Okay, let's move on to the more meaningful tests for the RTX 3070. While the card can certainly still handle 4K at playable framerates, like the RTX 2080 Ti, there are going to be plenty of situations where you'll have to tune and tweak the settings to get a smooth 60 fps. 1440p gaming, on the other hand, shouldn't pose any problem to the card.
9 Game Average
Nvidia says the 3070 is faster than the 2080 Ti, but that's only in select games. At 1440p ultra, it's more like a tie — there was only one game in our test suite where the 3070 won by more than a hair. Still, even matching the 2080 Ti is no mean feat, especially considering the price difference. Of course, now 2080 Ti cards will likely fall to much lower prices on places like eBay, but historically speaking, Nvidia's new architectures tend to improve with time, so the 3070 could end up being a bit faster than the 2080 Ti down the road.
That's interesting to see, considering the rather large memory bandwidth deficit. Overclocking doesn't make much of a difference either, so perhaps the 3070 is mostly held back by the GPU and not the GDDR6 memory. Regardless, this is a good showing for the Ampere architecture. It's as fast as the previous generation 260W TDP card while using 40W less power. And it costs $500, which means plenty of gamers can actually afford it, whereas the $1000-$1200 pricing of the 2080 Ti was out of reach for most people.
Borderlands 3
There's not much to say about the individual games. Borderlands 3 reaches very playable framerates of 85 fps at 1440p ultra and 153 fps at 1440p medium. Compared to the RTX 2070, it runs 50-65 percent faster — or 35-45 percent faster than the 2070 Super. Not that you'd really need to upgrade from either of those GPUs just yet. However, if you're sitting two generations back, the 3070 is now more than twice as fast as the 1070 and basically double the performance of the Vega 56.
The Division 2
The Division 2 puts the 2080 Ti ahead of the 3070 at all settings, but never by much. At 1440p, 2080 Ti is about 3-5 percent faster than 3070. Meanwhile, the 3070 is 30-35 percent ahead of the 2070 Super, 40-55 percent ahead of the 2070, and 110-135 percent ahead of the GTX 1070. Vega 56 definitely widened the gap relative to the 1070 over time, so the 3070 is 'only' 60-90 percent ahead of Vega 56.
Far Cry 5
Far Cry 5 is getting a bit old, and it definitely hits some CPU limits at 1080p. That starts to fade away at 1440p ultra, but 1440p medium showed relatively weak minimum fps on the overclocked 3070 for some reason. Anyway, we're looking forward to Far Cry 6 next year, so we won't spend any more time analyzing this 2.5 years old game.
Final Fantasy XIV
This is another older game that hits pretty high framerates, and it's one of the few instances where even the stock 3070 leads the 2080 Ti. By less than half of a percent, of course, so it's basically just a tie. This is a less demanding game, so the gaps between the various GPUs aren't quite as large here. We'll be switching to something else (Horizon Zero Dawn, probably) in the near future.
Forza Horizon 4
Forza Horizon 4 is the biggest lead we saw for the 3070 over the 2080 Ti, to the tune of up to four percent at 1440p. It's not much, but it's something. It's another game we're looking to retire from our GPU tests, mainly because of how much of a pain the Microsoft Store is to deal with. Project CARS 3 is the likely replacement, which we'll hit in our bonus games below.
Metro Exodus
We didn't enable ray tracing or DLSS (1.0) for Metro Exodus, but it's still a very demanding game — we'll check ray tracing and DLSS performance in the bonus round. The 3070 still runs very well at 1440p ultra and enabling RT and DLSS should still result in 60 fps gameplay, but the 2080 Ti ends up being 3-5 percent faster yet again. Elsewhere, the 3070 again leads the 2070 Super by around 30 percent, and is up to twice as fast as the GTX 1070.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 runs into CPU bottlenecks with the fastest GPUs, even at 1440p medium, but pushing up to ultra settings spreads things out. While the 3070 leads at 1440p medium, the 2080 Ti ends up five percent faster at 1440p ultra. The 3070 also leads the 2070 by 50 percent, and is close to 2.5 times as fast as the GTX 1070 here. Note that we test using the Vulkan API, which tends to perform best for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Like Metro, we've tested without RT or DLSS enabled for our primary benchmarks. We'll have RT + DLSS results below in the bonus gaming section. At the highest preset, the 3070 cranks out 115 fps, just a bit behind the 2080 Ti yet again. Do keep in mind that the 2080 Ti FE has a 90 MHz factory overclock, but then so did most other 2080 Ti cards — not many people were willing to pay that much money only to get a stock-clocked card, it seems.
Strange Brigade
Last, we have Strange Brigade, another game where we use the Vulkan API. It's pretty light compared to some of the other games in our suite, and the 3070 pushes well beyond the 144 fps mark that you'd want for a higher refresh rate 1440p display. Performance is again a bit behind the 2080 Ti, but well ahead of the 2070 Super and more than double the GTX 1070 and Vega 56.
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