In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 9 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of if turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. In total, each video card is tested 48 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So how did the EVGA RTX 3070 XC3 Black perform? Well, when broken down by FPS range and resolution the RTX 2070 XC3 Black was great at 1080p where it came in over 120 FPS on 12 of the results, and the rest were over 60 FPS. At 1440p things swung down slightly closer to half and half with 7 over 120 FPS and 9 over 60 FPS. Then at 4K we finally saw some results come in under 60 FPS with 5 in the 30-59 FPS range. Even still 11 out of the 16 were still over 60 FPS which is impressive. Going back to my 3070 Founders Edition review, none of these results changed.

That isn’t to say that they performed the same though, when we get into the actual results you can see that across the board the EVGA did outperform the Founders Edition. This is especially impressive given that they do have the same clock speeds but the EVGA also has a different power profile which makes a big difference. In my Founders Edition review, I was especially curious how it performed compared to the RTX 2080 Ti and at that time they came out even. But the increase in performance with the XC3 Black was enough of a bump to put it ahead of the 2080 Ti in five more tests. Of course, an aftermarket 2080 Ti could do the same thing. This kept the 3070 XC3 Black right up at the top of the charts with just the RTX 3080 consistently outperforming it (and the 3090 if I had one). At least until AMD's just announced GPUs can help stir things up near the top.