Late last month, NVIDIA announced two additions to its graphic cards portfolio. The new "gaming flagship" GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The flagship model launched on June 3rd, 2021 officially, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti a week later on June 10th, 2021.

If you know your way around video cards, you know that it is quite difficult to obtain reasonably priced cards due to the current market situation.

The RTX 3070 Ti is priced at $599 by NVIDIA, $100 more than last year's NVIDIA RTX 3070 card, which NVIDIA priced at $499.

According to NVIDIA's announcement, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti "boosts performance with more CUDA Cores and our super speed GDDR6X memory". While that sounds good on paper, it is less than 5% of an increase over the $100 cheaper RTX 3070 video card. RAM on the other hand has been improved significantly, as NVIDIA decided to use GDDR6X memory in the new card, which was only used in 3080 and 3090 cards up until now. PC Gamer ran benchmarks and RAM performance saw an impressive boost (608GB/s over 448GB/s).

Memory performance improves significantly, but the card has only 8 Gigabytes of it. That's fine compared to NVIDIA's own GeForce 3070 card, but not when you look at AMD's Radeon RX 6800 card, which comes with 16 Gigabytes. AMD's card was a bit on the pricey side when compared to the 3070, as it retails for $579, but it fares better against NVIDIA's new card as it is cheaper and comes with more RAM.

Memory is not everything though, as performance is what ultimately matters for gamers. Benchmarks by PC Gamer show very similar performance for NVIDIA's card and AMD's card. Performance differed slightly in the 4K benchmarks, e.g. 56 to 57 average FPS in Metro Exodus, or 67 to 62 average FPS in Horizon Zero Dawn.

Benchmarks by The Verge paint a similar picture at 1440P and 4K. Compared to the 3070, the 3070 Ti does better in most benchmarks, but not by much. In some, its performance was worse.

NVIDIA claims that the 3070 Ti delivers a 1.5x performance improvement over the RTX 2070 Super, and a 2x improvement over the GTX 1070 Ti.

Gamers who run older video cards will see higher performance improvements. The 3070 Ti is not designed as a replacement for the 3070, but likely released by Nvidia to have a competing model for AMD's RX 6800 card (which offers better performance than the regular 3070 version, but comes with a higher price tag).

NVIDIA customers who run older video cards can now select NVIDIA's latest model over AMD's.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti closes the gap to AMD's RX 6800, but it has a slightly higher price and less RAM.

Chance is high that you won't be able to buy the new video card anytime soon, as demand is much higher than what is actually available.

To answer the title question: it is quite a good card, but not convincing enough to send out a strong "buy me instead of AMD" signal to gamers.

Now You: do you pay attention to video card releases? Which card do you favor?