You’ve seen the RTX 3060 Ti vs the 5060 Ti, and the RTX 3070 vs the 5070, but today it’s time for the RTX 3070 Ti vs the RTX 5070 Ti. The 3070 Ti, which launched back in May 2021, was in a bit of an awkward spot at the time. Coming in at $599, it sat right between the highly praised RTX 3070 and the powerhouse RTX 3080, but it often felt like it had more in common with the former than the latter. The main point was that it kept the same 8GB of VRAM as the non-Ti model, which even back then was starting to look a little lean for a card aimed at pushing 1440p and entry-level 4K territory, but it swapped the standard GDDR6 for faster, hotter GDDR6X memory.
That change gave the 3070 Ti a significant bandwidth boost to 608GB/s, but it came at the cost of much higher power consumption, often drawing nearly 300W for performance gains that sometimes only amounted to single-digit percentages over the vanilla RTX 3070. Fast forward to the RTX 5070 Ti, and NVIDIA has addressed the biggest complaint of that generation by doubling the memory capacity. With a new architecture, new features, and more memory throughput, is the upgrade from the 3070 Ti worth it overall? Well, that’s what we’re going to find out now that the Blackwell-based GPU has been out for almost a year.
As you all know, the Blackwell-based 5070 Ti lands with a much healthier 16GB of GDDR7 memory. Unlike the 5070 we looked at, which was trimmed down to a 192-bit bus, the Ti model restores the full 256-bit bus that we saw on the original 3070 Ti. When you combine that wider bus with the blistering speeds of GDDR7, the bandwidth jumps to massive levels, far exceeding what even the old RTX 3080 could manage. This creates a much clearer separation between the 70-class and the 70 Ti-class this generation than we saw back in the Ampere days.
Price-wise, the 5070 Ti does come with a premium, however. While the 3070 Ti launched at $599, the 5070 Ti has crept up the pricing ladder, often sitting closer to $699 or $749 depending on the model. However, for that extra cash, you are getting a card that effectively doubles the frame buffer and offers a generational leap in efficiency, meaning you’re no longer just paying for a slightly overclocked card with hotter memory like we arguably saw with the 3070 Ti.
For gamers still holding onto that 2021 release, the upgrade argument here is much stronger than it was for base 3070 owners. You have the choice of moving from a card that was often VRAM-limited in modern titles to one that has enough headroom for the next few years of high-fidelity gaming, all while running cooler and quieter thanks to the architectural improvements of Blackwell. But as always, yes, there is a performance jump, but by how much?
To see exactly what you’d get from upgrading from an RTX 3070 Ti, we put both cards onto our GPU test system with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB 6000MHz CL30 memory on a Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master motherboard. All testing was done on the latest version of Windows with the latest updates and, for our testing, we used the latest NVIDIA 581.80 Game Ready driver. We’ll be looking at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results today, and looking at the performance increase that you’d get going from an RTX 3070 Ti 8GB card to an RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GPU.
So, with that out of the way, let’s get into those glorious benchmarks.
