GeForce RTX 3070 from Asus

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 series has proven to be a touch controversial because of extremely low availability and inflated prices. Despite a slick launch presentation and largely favourable reviews for the high-end GeForce RTX 3080 and ultra-premium GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs, buyers are frustrated and upset. Many are now saying they’ll hold off till reviews of AMD’s just-announced Radeon RX6000 series are out. regardless of how good the products are, they’re useless if buyers can’t get their hands on them. Now, it is time for the more mainstream GeForce RTX 3070 to hit the market, and demand is of course expected to be even higher. The GeForce RTX 3070 GPU remains a high-end piece of hardware aimed toward enthusiasts, and graphics cards supported it aren’t getting to be considered affordable, especially in India. Nvidia continues to position its RTX series with ray tracing as premium offerings. The RTX 3070 will cater mainly to those that want to play today’s games at the very best settings at 1440p, or who don’t mind a couple of tradeoffs at 4K.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 architecture and specifications

As its name suggests, the GeForce RTX 3070 may be a smaller implementation of Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture than its siblings, the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090. It uses all an equivalent building blocks including Nvidia’s second-gen ray tracing cores and third-gen tensor cores for AI acceleration, which incorporates Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) resolution upscaling tech. On the more traditional shader operations side, Nvidia says it’s doubled the throughput of floating-point calculations.

DLSS are some things that becomes more important with non-flagship GPUs since its whole purpose is to catch up on low frame rates caused by the huge demand that ray tracing can placed on your hardware. DLSS essentially renders a game at a lower resolution, which is a smaller amount resource-intensive, then upscales the output to your required target. When first introduced with the RTX 20-series (Turing architecture), it did not have much traction, but has since been adopted by more and more game developers. Nvidia even says that DLSS can sometimes deliver sharper graphics than native rendering.

Ray tracing allows for incredibly realistic spot and area lighting, shadows, reflections and refractions, and more. This in fact means graphics are far more immersive, and within the future we’d see gameplay mechanics that really depend upon ray tracing. However, the performance penalty is gigantic therefore the benefits are out of reach for several gamers. If Ampere’s generational improvements can bring better performance to lower prices, ray tracing will have a way better chance of going mainstream.

And it is not just gameplay – Nvidia says its Ampere architecture brings new benefits and better performance to related activities like streaming or broadcasting, also as using game engines to make realistic animation. Tensor cores, for instance , are often wont to help improve voice and video quality also as cancel noise and replace your background while livestreaming.

In terms of numbers, the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU is provided with 5,888 CUDA cores, 184 tensor cores and 46 RT cores, organised into 46 clusters called Streaming Multiprocessors. The GPU runs at up to 1725MHz. All GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards will have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus for a complete memory bandwidth of 448GBps. The official TDP for Nvidia’s Founders Edition is 220W. Nvidia’s partners including Asus are liberal to tweak speeds and a few other hardware, most notably the designs of the PCB and cooling apparatus.

The HDMI 2.1 standard allows for 4K 120Hz over one cable, and you furthermore may get DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. Hardware video encoding is additionally updated with support for the emerging high-quality, royalty-free AV1 codec. Another forward-looking feature is support for Microsoft’s upcoming DirectStorage API which can allow games to load data directly from storage devices to a GPU’s memory pool instead of browsing system memory first. this might make expecting levels to load a thing of the past, and frees the CPU from having to decompress huge textures.

Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 design and features

As you would possibly have guessed by the 220W TDP, the GeForce RTX 3070 requires serious cooling. For this model in its TUF Gaming series, Asus has developed a huge three-fan assembly fitted in an all-aluminium shield with a vented metal backplate. The three fans use an axial design with the one within the centre spinning opposite to the opposite two to scale back noise and improve airflow. They only spin up when the GPU temperature crosses 55 degrees so you do not need to worry about noise at idle.

The heatsink itself isn’t huge, but it’s very wide and opened up in three sections with multiple heatpipes snaking their way around between them. you’ll see all of this because the sides are fully exposed instead of being enclosed during a shroud. this suggests also means hot air is expelled within your PC case, not channelled out through the rear . This is gigantic card and it’ll occupy three slots in your cabinet – Asus calls it a “2.7 slot design” which leaves some room for air movement but not much else. It measures 299.9 x 126.9 x 51.7mm. it’ll hang over the sting of a typical ATX motherboard. it is also quite heavy and does feel very solid.

Asus has gone with a comparatively demure dark grey colour. There are a couple of lines and creases within the metal cooler plate for effect, and if you look closely you will see a couple of sections with a really light geometric pattern or brushed metal texture. There are not any splashes of red or garish “gamer” accents – the sole RGB LED element may be a small TUF series logo on the highest with alittle bar beneath it. you’ll in fact control this with Asus’ Aura Sync utility. There are a couple of patterns to settle on from, otherwise you can have it react to GPU temperature.

For some reason, Asus also highlights the very fact that the mounting bracket is formed of chrome steel , despite the very fact that it’ll be hidden away as soon as you put in this card. there is a surprise though – along side three DisplayPorts, there are two HDMI outputs instead of the standard one. Only up to four are often used at a time, but this might make life easier for people with VR headsets.

You’ll need two standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors and Asus recommends a 750W power supply minimum, which is perhaps overkill unless you’ve got tons of other high-end hardware. It seems that partner brands are yet to adopt Nvidia’s new miniature power connector design, so you do not need to worry about an adapter. A BIOS switch near the facility connectors allows you to toggle between the default performance mode and a quiet mode without software tweaking. Of course, Asus says it’s used extremely high-quality components and manufacturing processes. The fans are said to be engineered for durability, and therefore the power regulators and capacitors “meet military-grade certification”. The vented backplate helps support the load of this huge card

Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 performance

I found out the Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 using precisely the same hardware that I tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition card on, which should make direct comparison easy. This rig is comprised of an AMD Ryzen 2 2700X CPU, a Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 Wifi motherboard, 2x8GB of G.Skill F4-3400C16D-16GSXW DDR4 RAM, a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo SSD, and a Corsair RM650 power supply. The monitor may be a 4K Asus PB287Q. I installed all the newest Windows 10 updates before testing. Nvidia supplied a pre-release version of its 456.96 driver for testing purposes.

Starting with synthetic tests, it’s clear that the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU is in a position to deliver roughly between 75 percent and 90 percent of the performance of the GeForce RTX 3080 which isn’t bad considering that it comes in at around 70 percent of its bigger sibling’s cost. The DLSS feature test result shows a way wider gap in performance this point , with a surprisingly higher overall result. As for in-game benchmarks, I started as was common with the reliable Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the resolution at 4K and therefore the Highest quality preset selected. First, with RTX shadows and DLSS disabled, the benchmark was ready to manage a mean of 55fps. Setting RTX shadows to medium quality and turning DLSS on, the typical shifted to 63fps but some sections were a touch choppy.

The GeForce RTX 3070 can seemingly almost handle 4K, but you would possibly want to step right down to 1440p sometimes. In Far Cry 5’s built-in benchmark, the typical was 62fps at 4K but visuals weren’t the smoothest. At 1440p, the typical rose to 65fps and there was an improvement in overall quality. Middle Earth: Shadow of War managed 70fps at 4K using the Ultra preset which jumped up to 98fps at 1440p. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey may be a bit more demanding, pushing out just 41fps at 4K using the Ultra High preset. After multiple attempts to tweak settings, the sport got up to a way smoother 58fps average at 1440p using the High preset. Playing through The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt manually, the GeForce RTX 3070 managed a really smooth 59fps at 4K with all the settings turned up to the utmost level.

Control may be a great showcase of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS tech. First, with ray tracing effects set to high but rendering natively at 4K, the frame rate barely rose above 27fps, as seen using Nvidia’s game overlay. Disabling ray tracing entirely caused a jump up to 47fps. With ray tracing back on and DLSS enabled, the typical stayed at around 45fps and therefore the game was perfectly enjoyable, which suggests that DLSS was effectively ready to catch up on the performance loss while maintaining visual quality. Changing the DLSS target to 1440p (making the sport actually render at 1707×960 before upsampling), my average went up to 61fps.

Verdict

Nvidia’s official base price for GeForce RTX 3070 cards, including its own Founders Edition product, is Rs. 51,000 in India. which may seem excessive, but that’s only due to Indian taxes and import duties. Asus has priced its TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 at Rs. 54,500 (plus taxes) which is certainly a premium. in fact everything depends on actual availability – as we have seen over the past month, the scarcity of higher-end GeForce RTX 30-series cards has given dealers the chance to boost street prices by 15-25 percent.

The GeForce RTX 3070 may be a great GPU to take a position in if you’re proud of gaming at 1440p or don’t decide to push too hard if you are doing ever upgrade to a 4K monitor. You get the advantages of Nvidia’s relatively mature ray tracing efforts, plus performance at par with last year’s flagship. it’d be somewhat overkill if you are not getting to play tons of games that incorporate ray tracing. If this is often still too expensive for you, it’d be worth expecting the inevitable RTX 3060.