GeForce RTX 3070 Ti founder edition review - Introduction

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti FE (Founder edition) review

It definitely is more affordable than what was released last week, but not as fast as lightning, meet the new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, as in the founder edition from NVIDIA. It's a graphics card series that will sit in between 3070 and 3080 performance levels, a product that is on the heels of the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. Yeah, there's no disputing it. It has been odd and even grotesque if we're talking computer components alone, silicon shortages, mining, scalpers. It's been sour grapes for a long time now. Likely that won't change the short term. People are almost fighting to grab a decently priced graphics card, often running up to three times the MSRP pricing. 

People even have been asking us, why are you still even reviewing these graphic cards when there're not available? The answer is simple: once they become available, you surely want to read up about their performance and get all facts together to make an informed decision.  NVIDIA is staying on its trajectory, implementing hash-rate limitations for consumer-grade GPUs and releasing refresh products pretty much as scheduled. Last week, we saw a refresh product that positioned itself between the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090. That product would be the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. NVIDIA, however, has one more product to add to the Ampere lineup, another Ti model, and this round, the 3070 Ti makes a fashionable appearance.

Armed with a shader core count of 6144 units, this card is paired with 8GB of GDDR6X graphics memory running 19 Gbps. Though the VRAM value seems a tad low, it surely is bound to be a powerhouse and maybe even a bit of an animal. Please do remember that it was less than a year ago that NVIDIA launched their Ampere GPU series, September 2020, in fact. A week before announcements, specifications of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090 took a twist; the shader core count mysteriously doubled up from what everybody expected, to date something massively important to this product range as yes, the competition has gotten fiercer as well. NVIDIA's 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. This second wave of announcements sees the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti. The full desktop product line of Ampere for consumers now entails the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, 3070 8GB GDDR6, RTX 3070 Ti 8GB, RTX 3080 10GB, RTX 3080 Ti 12GB, and RTX 3090; what we test today is an 8GB GDDR6X high-end product.

Much like the 3070, the 3070 Ti will base based on the existing GA104 GPU from NVIDIA, however, reconfigured with a move from GDDR6 towards GDDR6X. The card has an effective 6144 Shader processors activated, and that's up 256 shader cores from the 5888 in the older RTX 3070 model. NVIDIA added a 100 USD price premium to this newly revised model, and that makes this FE product a somewhat nauseating 599 USD, will it be worth it?