Not only gamers love graphics cards. Those who build or tune their own PCs for video editing also love getting the latest and greatest graphics cards they can get their hands on. It’s also safe to say that NVIDIA’s latest 3000-series cards made a huge splash with their promise of more power at more affordable prices.
Prior to the 3000 series, the 2080 Ti was among the top choices considering its power. However, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 promises even better performance for drastically less cost than the 2080 Ti at launch. Gerald Undone was lucky enough to get his hands on a copy and promises to show us the differences between the two specifically when it comes to editing. Especially since the differences aren’t as simple as just newer is better.
As for the system he is adding the card to, we have an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X at 4.3 GHz, 32GB 3600MHz RAM, and, of course, the aforementioned 2080 Ti. Neither the 2080 or the new MSI-provided 3070 are going to be overclocked. Both are running at what setting the manufacturers chose.
First up for testing is a render in DaVinci Resolve. It was an 18-minute video with multiple tracks with multiple codecs, including DNx, H.264, and H.265 plus some Fusion effects, text layers, transitions, and shading.
Rendering target was a standard H.264 MOV. The RTX 2080 Ti knocked this out in 6 minutes 45 seconds. Three different exports confirmed the results. Swapping in the 3070 the results changes to 7 minutes 35 seconds. That’s a 12% advantage for the 2080 Ti.
For comparison, he put in an older GTX 1080 and the export took just over 13 minutes. Needless to say the latest cards have made dramatic improvements.
In the Puget 4K Benchmark the results are confirmed yet again with the 2080 Ti hitting 1217 and the 3070 reaching 1071. However, Gerald points out that timeline performance is practically the same between the two cards.
There are still other benchmarks to look at! 3DMark Time Spy was actually closer at 13,788 for the 3070 and 14,407 for the 2080 Ti. Interestingly, in OctaneBench the 3070 actually beat the 2080 Ti.
Generally speaking, the 2080 Ti will give video editors about a 10% boost in performance. The 2080 Ti is a higher-end card, it’s just older, but the 352-bit memory bus and more VRAM against the more pedestrian 256-bit bus on the 3070 gives it a boost for rendering.
Another thing to talk about is the temperature. NVIDIA did a lot of work to get temperatures down on the 3000 series. The cards are much larger and have better heat management.
The max temperatures Gerald hit were 67 degrees C for the 3070 and 78 degrees C for the 2080 Ti. That’s a dramatic improvement and means you might be able to push the clock on the 3070 to get similar performance to the 2080 Ti.
Tied to the temperature is the noise. Once these cards get running those fans get loud. Fortunately the 3070 makes improvements here as well with a 39.2 dB(A) reading compared to the 2080 Ti’s 41.7 dB(A). The 3070 is even more efficient, using on average 238 W while the 2080 Ti used 261 W.
Considering you are getting slightly lower performance with the 3070, it makes sense to see these advantages in noise, heat, and power draw. We absolutely can’t forget about price.
The 3070 comes in significantly less than the 2080 Ti. Once you consider value the 3070 offers it almost seems like the easy choice for most people building their own machine.
The elephant in the room is AMD. They have new cards that are designed to compete with NVIDIA’s offerings and they are also priced competitively. Personally, I would seriously consider them, but I have to mention that Gerald is hesitant as his experiences have shown that NVIDIA cards and features have been more consistent for content creation. He does appreciate the competition though.
Have you been hunting for a new NVIDIA 3000-series graphics card?
[source: Gerald Undone]
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