Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Will Judd

Updated on 10 Jun 2021

Next up we have two Ubisoft games, Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, plus two other semi-recent releases: Death Stranding and Hitman 2. Note that we have an even split between DX11 and DX12 representation here, with Far Cry and Assassin's Creed on the older API and the remainder on the latest DirectX.

As we mentioned earlier, we're using our 2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a ultra premium Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal at DDR4-3600 CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by a hefty 1000W Corsair RM1000i PSU.

Death Stranding

The Decima Engine tends to favour AMD hardware, so we're expecting to see a big lead for the RX 6800 over the 3070 Ti - but in actual fact Team Red is able to claim only a four percent advantage at the highest resolution we tested, 4K. However, this is still a decent showing from Team Green, with the 3070 Ti outperforming the 3070 by nearly 10 percent and the RTX 2070 Super by 54 percent. AMD's advantage evaporates at 1440p, with the two cards nearly indistinguishable, while the 3070 to 3070 Ti gap narrows to four percent. Finally, at 1080p, we see much the same - a five percent lead for the Ti over the regular 3070 and a two percent lead over the RX 6800.

Death Stranding: Max, DX12, TAA

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is another benchmark that shows how different cards can swap places throughout the run, with AMD and Nvidia both claiming performance wins at various tiers depending on what's being shown on-screen. On average though, you can expect slightly better performance - and lower worst one percent scores - from the 3070 Ti compared to the RX 6800. At lower resolutions, the single-core nature of the Far Cry 5 game becomes more evident and CPU bottlenecking starts to occur, allowing the 3070 Ti to push its advantage over the RX 6800 to 13 percent - potentially down to the AMD driver's greater CPU utilisation in DX11 titles.

Far Cry 5: Ultra, DX11, TAA

Hitman 2

As with Far Cry 5, Hitman 2 is CPU-bound at lower resolutions so it makes sense to concentrate at the 4K results where we can see meaningful differences. The RTX 3070 Ti is only moderately faster than the OG 3070, with a seven percent advantage, while the 3080 achieves another level of performance with a 25 percent edge. The RX 6800 does well here too, with a five percent lead over the 3070 Ti. We also see almost identical frame-rates between the 3070 and the RTX 2080 Ti, with only margin-of-error differences between them.

Hitman 2: Ultra, DX12, TAA

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

AC Odyssey's built-in benchmark has various foibles, like occasional clouds that tank frame-rates on runs where they appear, plus heavy CPU and GPU utilisation that makes it difficult to find meaningful performance advantages - especially at the Ultra High preset we're operating under here. The 3070 Ti is nearly 10 percent faster than the regular 3070 here, pushing the average closer to the 60fps mark, but you'll need to pick up an RTX 3080 or better to achieve a 60+ frames per second average. Curiously, the RX 6800 are 3070 Ti are dead ringers here, although if you watch the frame-time data through a full run you'll see there are certain viewpoints that run better on Team Red or Team Green hardware - the 3070 Ti runs faster initially, while the RX 6800 does better in the second half of the bench. It's nice that they just happen to balance each other out.