Overall Performance, Energy Efficiency, Mining
Looking at the relative 4K performance of each card, normalised to the GeForce RTX 3090, across five rasterisation-only and two rasterisation-and-raytracing titles, gives greater insight into how everything really stacks up.
Our numbers suggest that the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti benchmarks 7.1 per cent faster than the regular RTX 3070. The bigger, more powerful RTX 3080 is 23 per cent faster than it - a figure that's telling at a 4K resolution with all the eye candy turned on.
Meanwhile, the rival AMD Radeon RX 6800 puts up a similar showing even though it's handicapped by relatively poor performance in Watch Dogs: Legion.
We take the normalised performance here and then divide the score by the reported system-wide power consumption, leading to a rudimentary energy efficiency metric.
The RTX 3070 Ti's 290W TGP is taken to task by both the regular RTX 3070 and rival Radeon RX 6800.
We further ran each card through a five-minute Ethereum hashing benchmark - Phoenix Miner 5.6d - to see how Nvidia's new limiting strategy plays out.
These figures represent the out-the-box hash rates that can be further tuned for performance and power. As is, the RTX 3070 Ti FE benchmarks at only 38MH/s, which is less than half the speed of the regular RTX 3080 FE. This is a deliberate software limitation rather than a hardware issue, made to make these cards less appealing to the hordes of crypto miners out there.
AMD's Radeon RX 6800 is a significant 59 per cent faster here.