Until September 2020, the RTX 2080 Ti was the fastest consumer graphics card on the market and retailed for $1000 - often more. Now, Nvidia's new RTX 3070 is here, with Team Green promising the same level of graphics performance at $500, half the price. That's a bold yet simple proposition that will no doubt spur a lot of upgrades, so does it hold water? We've been testing the 3070's gaming performance and power efficiency for the past week to find out.
For what it's worth, Nvidia certainly seems to be expecting a lot of demand. The RTX 3070 was originally set to go live in mid-October, but the launch was delayed by two weeks to build up inventory of the new cards and bulk up measures against automated purchases. The RTX 3080 and 3090 both sold out immediately and remain near-impossible to find six weeks post-launch, so let's hope that availability is improved this time around.
So assuming for a moment that cards are available for purchase in any kind of reasonable time frame, how does the RTX 3070 deliver the kind of performance gains Nvidia is claiming?