Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti review: ray-tracing performance

Ray Tracing is a pretty cool name, and it also serves as one of Nvidia's largest extant advantages against an increasingly competitive AMD side. Here we'll see how the use of RT affects the balance of power in three games - Control, Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5. Note that, like our previous reviews, we're using native 1440p resolution for these tests, which is about as high as you can push even on high-end GPUs without using something like DLSS or FidelityFX Super Resolution to make up for RT's heavy performance penalty.

Control

As we mentioned in our previous review, Control is basically AMD's worst nightmare - a game that their cards do poorly in even in purely rasterised rendering and one that supports ray tracing. To give you an idea of the extent of this catastrophe, the $600 3070 Ti here outperforms the $1000 RX 6900 XT - and even the RTX 2080 Super, with its first-gen RT cores, manages 86 percent of the AMD flagship's performance. Looking at the Nvidia-only comparisons, the 3070 Ti is eight percent better than the regular 3070, but still only three-quarters as fast as the RTX 3080.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus isn't as hostile to AMD cards as Control, but the 3070 Ti still outguns the RX 6900 XT here by four percent. Compared to the OG 3070, the Ti has a seven percent lead, while the 3080 leads the newest GeForce card by 23 percent. We also have results for the 2060 Super, 2070 Super and 2080 Super on tap, so it's worth mentioning that the 3070 Ti claims a 55 percent gen-on-gen advantage over the 2070S, and 37 percent over the second-fastest Ampere consumer GPU, the 2080 Super.

Battlefield 5

We conclude our ray tracing testing with Battlefield 5, an early demonstration of RT tech that uses just one part of the RT toolbox, reflections. That means it doesn't impose such a heavy RT performance penalty, which should give AMD a fighting chance. Unfortunately, the 3070 Ti is still the better RT card against the RX 6900 XT, despite AMD's top gun offering considerably better performance in purely rasterised games. Against the regular 3070, the 3070 Ti is seven percent ahead - a sentence we've probably written nearly a dozen times by now.

All of the benchmarks have been completed, so now it's time to light the candles at the Crysis shrine and summon the Digital Foundry verdict.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti analysis

• Introduction and hardware analysis
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Game Benchmarks Part 2
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Resizable BAR benchmarks and requirements
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks [This Page]
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti - the Digital Foundry verdict