RTX 3060 Ti Vs. RTX 3070: Best Affordable Nvidia Graphics Card?

For gamers who have held off on upgrading their graphics card because of the cost, there is now a new option with the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Priced lower than all of the other RTX 30-Series cards released earlier in 2020, it is sure to be a hot seller for those looking to upgrade their computer’s visual performance. However, is it too budget? More importantly, how does it compare with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, which until now, was the cheapest card in the series?

A leading seller of GPUs, Nvidia announced its GeForce RTX 30-Series cards back on September 1, 2020. The series caught the public’s attention in part for its ability to mimic the physics of how light bounces off objects, in real-time. The result is much more realistic 3D environments. At the time, the series consisted of three cards, the economical RTX 3070, the mid-range RTX 3080 and the top-end RTX 3090, which is capable of 8K HDR gaming. The graphics cards proved quite popular, especially the RTX 3080, which sold out in record time on launch day.

Now the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been added to the mix. Starting at $399, it is $100 cheaper than the RTX 3070 and has most of the same specs. For example, they both have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM with a 256-bit memory interface width. Like all the other cards in the 30-Series, the RTX 3060 Ti uses Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, has third-generation tensor cores, second-generation ray-tracing cores, a PCI Express Gen 4 bus and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate support. It also has access to all the same tweaks as the other cards through the Nvidia GeForce Experience application. So users can do things, such as customize how a game looks in real-time with Nvidia Freestyle, take high-quality screenshots with Nvidia Ansel or record gameplay with Nvidia ShadowPlay. It also has Nvidia G-Sync support, which cuts down on screen lag when connected to compatible monitors, with refresh rates of up to 360Hz.

Where The Two RTX Cards Differ

On the surface, it seems there’s really isn’t much point in buying the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, as it’s mostly a more expensive version of the RTX 3060 Ti. However, there are a couple of areas where the RTX 3070 is superior. For one, it has more Nvidia CUDA cores: 5,888 to the RTX 3060 Ti’s 4,864. CUDA stands for “compute unified device architecture” and it is Nvidia’s parallel computing platform. Like with many specs, more cores translates to better performance. Similarly, the RTX 3070 is the faster of the two cards. While the boost clock speed of the RTX 3060 Ti is 1.67 GHz, the RTX 3070 can run at 1.73 GHz. This is actually the fastest clockspeed of any of the graphic cards in the series, though the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 do have advantage in other areas, such as even more CUDA cores and more gigabytes of better-quality video RAM.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether these small differences will make much of a difference to the casual gamer. Overall, the RTX 3060 Ti will likely underperform compared to the RTX 3070, but in everyday use, the difference between the two cards may not be as noticeable. When it comes down to it, both cards are the low-end GPUs in the RTX 30-Series. Customers, who consider performance a key concern, will likely prefer to invest in either the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. For everyone else, Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti is probably the better buy, simply for the fact that it’s cheaper.

Source: Nvidia

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