NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Linux Performance
Last week the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review embargo lifted while today NVIDIA has lifted it on the RTX 3070 Ti ahead of the official availability tomorrow. Here are the initial Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti up against the rest of the GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs as well as AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series competition.
The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is quite similar to the existing RTX 3070 graphics card except that it has 6144 CUDA cores over 5888 on the non-Ti variant and enjoys a 1.58GHz base clock compared to 1.50GHz and a 1.77GHz boost clock compared to 1.73GHz. The RTX 3070 Ti also has 8GB of GDDR6X video memory compared to standard DDR6 on the original RTX 3070. These improvements with the RTX 3070 Ti lead to a 290 Watt graphics card power compared to 220 Watts on the non-Ti RTX 3070. Aside from that, the RTX 3070 family part of the RTX 30 Ampere series is quite similar.
The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is expected to retail for around $599 USD while availability will be the tricky part once these cards start appearing at Internet retailers tomorrow.
To no surprise given our success with the rest of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series line-up, the RTX 3070 Ti was working without issue under Linux when using the latest proprietary driver. The NVIDIA 465.31 driver was used the past two weeks for testing as the latest public driver - while it doesn't officially list the RTX 3070 Ti and reports the GPU just as a "NVIDIA Device", it's been working fine across our OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan / CUDA / OptiX benchmarking without any problems -- similar to the RTX 3080 Ti working fine on this driver release.
The NVIDIA 465.31 driver was used for all of the NVIDIA graphics cards benchmarked for this article. On the AMD side the Linux 5.13 kernel plus Mesa 21.2-devel was the graphics driver stack used for testing there. All testing occurred from a Ryzen 9 5900X desktop running Ubuntu 21.04.
The graphics cards tested based on what I had available included the:
- GTX 1080
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2070 SUPER
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 SUPER
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX
- RTX 3060
- RTX 3060 Ti
- RTX 3070
- RTX 3070 Ti
- RTX 3080
- RTX 3080 Ti
- RTX 3090
- RX 6700 XT
- RX 6800
- RX 6800 XT
Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide variety of Linux gaming benchmarks both native and Steam Play (Proton) were used for testing. Additionally, some Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks were conducted too in this article -- for those tests on the AMD side it meant using the Radeon Software "PRO" Vulkan packaged driver for having Vulkan ray-tracing support rather than using the Mesa RADV driver.