Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition - £369 (UK RRP) Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition - £469 (UK RRP) Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition - £649 (UK RRP)
The RTX 3070 and 3080 remain excellent graphics cards for the money, offering extremely strong performance for 1440p or 4K gaming plus some essential next-gen features: hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS, a feature that uses AI to boost frame-rates considerably. That’s meant that the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 have remained Digital Foundry recommendations since their debut two years ago, especially as the newer cards we’ve seen - namely, the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti - offer only a miniscule increase in performance over their predecessors while costing significantly more.
(For more info, check out our RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 reviews - and our counterpart RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti tests for a more up-to-date judgement of Nvidia’s latest options!)
The RTX 3060 Ti is also available, which is an awesome choice for 1080p or 1440p gaming and offers perhaps the best value out of any card in the stack. It runs relatively cool and quiet, while producing some excellent performance - not bad for a card that costs £100 less than the RTX 3070 but delivers 90 percent of the performance.
Of course, next-gen RTX graphics cards are expected to debut by the end of the year, so there’s an argument to be made that you’re better off waiting for the new models. These will offer better performance - at a higher power cost, if rumours are correct - but will almost certainly be much harder to find than the current-gen models. So, your mileage may vary - but I’d be awfully tempted to grab one of these known good performers at a reasonable price and opt out of the madness that seems certain to follow!
