So why is this card so hotly anticipated? Put simply, it brings the advancements of Nvidia’s bleeding-edge Ampere GPUs like the RTX 3080 and 3090 down to a more mainstream price point, while still offering more than enough performance for the 1080p and 1440p screens that are the most popular amongst gamers. If you’re building a mid-range to high-end rig, this is a great choice with a good degree of future-proofing, thanks to HDMI 2.1 support, 8GB of VRAM and DLSS/RT capabilities. It’s also cheaper than AMD’s competing RX 6800, which doesn’t have a DLSS alternative and may not be as competitive in RT performance. All that is to say that this card is expected to go fast, even though Nvidia has claimed that a greater number of cards will be available, so here’s what you need to know - and the web pages you should probably bookmark! If you prefer Nvidia’s Founders Edition card, with its unique ‘flow-through’ dual-fan design, take a look at the Nvidia Store where this variant is exclusively available. Of course, you can also buy the RTX 3070 at Best Buy, where you’ll be able to get the exclusive Founder’s Edition of the card. The RTX 3070’s closest AMD competitor will be the RX 6800, when that card launches next month. The smallest member of the three Big Navi cards announced so far, the RX 6800 should offer better performance than the RTX 3070 but may trail the Nvidia card in ray-tracing performance and costs $80 more. The RX 6800 also doesn’t have an alternative to the RTX 3070’s DLSS feature, which boosts performance significantly in supported games. If you’re planning on a Ryzen 5000 build, then the RX 6800 will be able to eke out extra performance through giving these processors easy access to Radeon 6000 GPU memory. Ultimately, we won’t know which card is the best bet until our RX 6000 reviews are out, but there are arguments to be made for both sides.
