Nvidia's RTX 3070 is coming on October 29th

Nvidia have confirmed that the RTX 3070 will launch on October 29th, just a day after the planned reveal of AMD's upcoming Big Navi GPUs. The RTX 3070 is the third and final graphics card of Nvidia's currently announced new Ampere family to come out this year, following on from the launch of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 last month. It's due to deliver RTX 2080 Ti-level speeds for a fraction of the cost, practically guaranteeing that its shelf life is going to be even more short-lived than either of its still sold out Ampere siblings.

"Production of GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards are ramping quickly," Nvidia said on their GeForce blog. "We’ve heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day. To help make that happen, we are updating the availability date to Thursday, October 29th.

"We know this may be disappointing to those eager to purchase a GeForce RTX 3070 as soon as possible, however this shift will help our global partners get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers on launch day."

Launching for £469 / $499, the RTX 3070 is set to be quite a step up from the existing RTX 2070 and 2070 Super, especially if Nvidia's claims of faster-than-RTX-2080-Ti levels of performance prove accurate. The RTX 2080 Ti was Nvidia's flagship 4K graphics card when it launched at the end of 2018, and has always cost well in excess of £1000 / $1000 ever since it came out. The RTX 3070, however, looks like it will finally make 4K gaming a bit more affordable for PC gamers, although Nvidia have yet to release any kind of benchmark figures to show us just how the two cards match up.

Instead, they've only released these 1440p figures so far (pictured below, click to enlarge), which were measured on max settings with an unnamed Intel Core i9 processor. And yes, we can see the RTX 3070 does indeed look as though it's going to offer RTX 2080 Ti-level performance in a handful of games at 1440p, although Borderlands 3 and Control still put the RTX 2080 Ti slightly ahead.

Really, though, I'm more interested in those 4K figures, as both the RTX 2070 and 2070 Super were already fantastic 1440p graphics cards that were more than capable of delivering 60fps on max settings anyway. Indeed, the RTX 2070 Super has been my top Nvidia recommendation in our best graphics card round-up for ages, so an extra x1.5-odd performance boost from the RTX 3070 isn't really all that exciting.

Alas, it looks like we'll have to wait until review samples are available to see what the RTX 3070 is capable of at 4K, so watch this space for more performance analysis closer to launch on October 29th. We'll also have a much better idea of what AMD have to offer by then, too, as their first crop of next-gen Big Navi GPUs will have been announced the day before on October 28th. So stay tuned folks, as the end of October is going to be a busy time for all things graphics cards.