NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU (mobile, GN20-E6, Max-P, Max-Q) is a mobile graphics card for notebooks and the refresh of the RTX 3070. It was announced early 2021 at CES and is based on the same GA104 Ampere chip as the old RTX 3070 Laptop. Compared to the old card, the newer one offers 15% more shaders but less clock speed. It will still feature the 256 Bit memory bus and 8 GB GDDR6. The RTX 3070ti is available in different power variants ranging from 80 Watt TGP with a Boost clock of 1035 MHz up to 125 Watt models with a Boost clock of 1485 MHz. However, there are even some models with a maximum TGP of 150 Watt (e.g., Acer Nitro 5).

There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q technologies (Dynamic Boost, Whispermode).

The performance depends on the TGP setting and cooling of the laptop. On average it should be somewhere between the old RTX 3070 Mobile and RTX 3080 Mobile (at similar TDP settings). Therefore, the card is best suited for QHD gaming in max details (for demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077). Less demanding games like the Farming Simulator 22 or older games should also run in 4K with max. detail settings.

The GA104 chip offers 6,144 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 3,072 INT32 ALUs). The RTX 3070 Ti however won't use all ALUs on the chip. With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The RTX 3070 Ti mobile series uses 5,888 of the 6,144 cores. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA104 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with Max-Q design is the power saving variant of the mobile RTX 2070 graphics card with reduced clock speeds and power consumption. Therefore, it is suitable for thin gaming laptops. It is based on the same TU106 chip with 2,304 shaders and 8 GB GDDR6 memory connected by a 256 bit interface (12 GHz).

Currently it looks like there will be two variants, a low power 80 Watt variant with 885 - 1185 MHz core clock and a faster 90 Watt variant with 1080 - 1305 MHz core clock). Both clock the memory at 6 GHz versus 7 GHz of the normal RTX 2070 (115 Watt TDP).

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1080 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU106 chip on a 12 nm FinFET process and includes features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT), which should combine to create more realistic lighting effects than older GPUs based on the company's Pascal architecture (if the games supports it). The RTX 20870 is also DisplayPort 1.4 ready, while there is also support for HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and H.265 video en/decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

Performance

The Max-Q version of the RTX 2070 should perform a bit slower than the mobile RTX 2070. Therefore, it should be able to run all demanding games in 2560x1440 with maximum details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.