The idea of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has obvious appeal. Positioned between the $500/£469 RTX 3070 and $700/£569 RTX 3080, the $600/£529 3070 Ti ought to offer noticeably better performance than the vanilla 3070 while being significantly more affordable than the 3080. The new card is also only $20/£0 more than the AMD's RX 6800, so there's potential here for Nvidia to offer equivalent performance in many games, plus better results in RT titles and a more mature feature set, at a broadly equivalent price.
Unfortunately though, the 3070 Ti doesn't really deliver on its premise, offering what is typically a single digit performance bump over the regular 3070 that simply isn't good enough given its 20 percent higher asking price – and that's without factoring in the normal Covid-era markups for graphics cards of any flavour. After a genuinely good value RTX 3060 Ti and an RTX 3080 Ti that brought 3090 performance to a lower price point, the 3070 Ti is therefore something of an unexpected combo-breaker.
Looking at the specs, we can start that Nvidia's latitude in delivering a midway point between RTX 3070 and 3080 was fundamentally limited. Rather than being a cut-down version of the RTX 3080's GA102 GPU, the 3070 Ti is instead a fully-enabled version of the RTX 3070's GA104. The CUDA core count jumps only 4.3 percent, from 5888 to 6144, compared to 8704 on the RTX 3080.
