GeForce RTX 3070 Founder edition review - Introduction

GeForce RTX 3070 FE (Founder edition) review

Yeah, you can say and try to comprehend technology launches and the effect that it can have on the market, but the past month or so certainly has shown an interesting dynamic. With the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 seeing a very rough start availability wise as well as the (solved) CTD issue, it is time to review and benchmark the slightly better affordable graphics card series in the high-end range; say hello to the much-wanted GeForce RTX 3070. Armed with a shader core count of 5888 units, this card is paired with 8 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory. Much has been said, rumored, and spoken about this card, as with that ginormous shading core count, it is bound to be a bit of a beast in that sub-500 EUR/USD price range. This product will sit at GeForce RTX 2080 Ti performance levels and, in due time, will be its replacement. 

On September 1st of the year, 2020 NVIDIA declared three initial Ampere graphics cards in its inaugural launch wave. A week before announcements, specifications of the GeForce RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 took a twist; the shader core count mysteriously doubled up from what everybody expected. The GPUs are fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process further develops Samsung's 10nm process; no EUV is applied in production just yet. The first wave of announcements would see the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 being released first, and, as a bit of a surprise, the GeForce RTX 3070 would be arriving in roughly the same timeframe as well. The initial launch of Ampere for consumers entails the GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6, RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X, and what we test today, the 24GB GDDR6X based premium flagship, the mighty mo, the GeForce RTX 3090. The lineup nearly doubles ray-tracing performance with Gen2 ray-tracing cores and 3rd iteration Tensor cores. These cards will all be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a, but most importantly is that exorbitant Shader processor count (referred to as CUDA cores by NVIDIA), passing the 10K marker for the flagship product, nobody... not even us, saw that one coming.

With roughly half the shader processor count, we now meet the NVIDIA GA104 GPU, initially to be used solely in the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards. And despite a lower segmented card, it still holds a sizable GPU die; the 3070's GA104-300-A1 GPU is firing up over 17 billion transistors. To compare, a GeForce RTX 3080 is listed at 8,704 Shader cores, and the GeForce RTX 3090 (GA102) has 10496 Shader cores. In this review, we'll check out the Founder edition GeForce RTX 3070, paired with 8GB of GDDR6 graphics memory. A product that runs a boost clock of 1730 MHz and the sheer muscle power makes you smile, a lasting one.