Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

"Faster than RTX 2080 Ti." You might have seen Nvidia's claim a few weeks back; we saw it, too. That was a tall order for Nvidia's $499 "Ampere"-based GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition graphics card. The mission: Beat last generation's top-end "Turing" card (the $1,199 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition), and do it for less than half the price. Well, the numbers are in, and we have to give Nvidia some serious props. In our tests, at 4K resolution, the RTX 3070 indeed pulls off the frame-rate wins at times, and when it can't, it is very close. Meanwhile, it trades blows with and sometimes ties the RTX 2080 Ti at lesser resolutions. Again: for $499.

It's not a by-the-numbers TKO, but in a larger sense, what the RTX 3070 does is still a knockout. Pull back, and consider that the RTX 3070 is cheaper than the RTX 2080 Ti by a factor of, oh, an entire budget gaming PC. Plus, it flattens RTX 2070 cards (and all AMD comers) in our suite of benchmarks. The expertly designed GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition is not the absolute fastest video card on the planet, but it deals almost every other card on shelves today (barring its RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 kin) a brutal takedown. It earns our Editors' Choice award and a perfect 5-star score as the best video-card value of this, or any, year.

Before we get to that benchmark beatdown, though, let's dig into the specifications of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition. We'll also see how it holds up against competing AMD options at a similar price, and against the cards it's set to replace in Nvidia's Turing line, the GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2070 Super. The RTX 3070 Founders Edition, like the RTX 3080 version, serves as a reference card for video-card makers, and a baseline on specs for the third-party versions of the RTX 3070 to come. Both it and the first third-party cards go on sale on Oct. 29. In the U.S., you'll be able to buy RTX 3070 Founders Edition cards directly from Best Buy and Microcenter (online or in-store), while Canadian customers should pursue it at BestBuy.com.