My GTX 1070 Founders Edition was an absolute workhorse. I got it in July of 2016 and used it until June of this year. Six glorious years of powering the graphics on my PC. It was first paired with an AMD FX-8350 and then an Intel Core i5 and finally an i9-9900k which I still use today.

I wanted to upgrade earlier but didn’t really feel the need to since I only have a 1080p PC monitor and don’t really care about super-sampling all too much. So, I skipped the 20 series cards and waited for the next generation. Of course with Covid, finding a new video card became hard to do, not to mention way too expensive. Since my 1070 was still working fine I just decided to wait until I found the card I wanted, the object of my desire, in a local store. By local I of course mean Best Buy as that’s the only place near me that carries higher end video cards.

Time passed and in June of this year I decided to just check out what they had in stock near me and the best option I had locally was an AMD RX 6600 XT. I looked at the specs and, certainly, it was more powerful than my 1070. Enough to where I decided to get it and assume I was done for a few years as usual. I was excited to try out AMD as I had not had one of their video cards for a long, long time. I got home and installed it. Sure enough, I was getting better performance with Flight Simulator 2020 and Forza Horizon 5 but it didn’t really feel like a generational leap. Flight Simulator still had frame rate issues, though much improved over the 1070. So, I decided to keep my eyes peeled for the card I actually wanted, an RTX 3070. I love the XX70 series cards, they are usually a very good mix of price and performance in my opinion. Also, that’s my max price point for a video card. I can’t justify spending more than that based on my use cases.

The other day I popped into my local Best Buy and there it was, an RTX 3070 Ti. Now I was only after the standard 3070 as the extra $100 for the Ti does not get a huge bump in performance on this particular card. However, there I was. There it was. Finally, I could get one at normal retail pricing, that day. Right now. And while I didn’t want to spend the extra $100, it is a faster card than the base 3070 so…one swipe of the credit card later, I had it.

The difference between this card and the RX 6600 XT is extremely evident. Flight Sim 2020 no longer had any stuttering when changing quick views or loading terrain. It’s now a very smooth, locked 60fps at 1080p on Ultra settings. I also saw video rendering times plummet and every game I test it with runs like a champ. Granted Flight Sim was the only game I had that gave the 6600 XT any issues at 1080p/Max Settings but now I feel a lot more future proof at that resolution.

That’s all, just a short ramble and pseudo-celebration that I was finally able to walk into a store and pay retail for the card I’ve been trying to get for a few years now. I sold both my 1070 and 6600 XT already. I wish I still had my 1070 though. That card served me very well and I’d love to still have it in my collection but at the end of the day I’m thrilled with my new purchase.