The GeForce RTX 3070 was supposed to be releasing on October 15, but Nvidia has just announced that the graphics card won’t be appearing on shelves until two weeks after that date.
The new availability date of October 29 is in place to give Nvidia and third-party graphics card manufacturers more time to get more products in place and ready to go on the shelves, the company noted in the announcement.
“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," the company said in a statement.
- The RTX 3070 may be a better buy than PS5 or Xbox Series X
- Check out all the best PC games
- We'll show you how to build a PC
Of course, you can’t have failed to have noticed all the negativity and disappointment around the launch of the RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards, with all the stock selling out in a flash (and much anger directed at the scalpers who have picked up many of these GPUs to sell on eBay).
Nvidia notes: “We’ve heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day.”
Navi interference
Of course, the interesting thing about the new release date is that it just happens to be the day after AMD’s Big Navi reveal on October 28. We’ve been talking about the possibility of Nvidia running interference with AMD’s launch by revealing an RTX 3080 with double the VRAM, but maybe this new move will prove a more potent thunder-stealer.
Nvidia boasts that the RTX 3070 “delivers similar or faster performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti”, and a provided graph shows near-identical performance in Control (with RTX on), and the 3070 being faster in Doom Eternal, and slightly slower in Borderlands 3.
The GeForce RTX 3070 will be the most affordable Ampere graphics card thus far, although an RTX 3060 won’t likely be far behind with any luck, because ‘affordable’ in this case is a relative term: the 3070 will set you back $499/£469. Compare that asking price to the RTX 2080 Ti’s price tag, though, and you get the idea of the value proposition on offer here…
