 Recently, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang said that for the holiday season and the foreseeable future, I think Pascal is just unbeatable. We assumed he meant on the very high end where AMD hasn't even teased an upcoming competitor, but I guess he probably already knew then that the GTX 1070 Ti was on its way. But what is this? An exciting new offering? Or just a transparent attempt by NVIDIA to get all the press, including us, talking about them by repackaging existing tech to secure their market share while Vega availability is low? So we're gonna show you some performance numbers, but only after we talk about the BS that NVIDIA is pulling with this launch. And after you listen to this word from our sponsor, Mack Weldon. Mack Weldon believes in smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping. Use offer code TECHTIPS to get 20% off your next order at the link below. 🎵 Looking at the spec sheet, GTX 1070 Ti has more in common with the 1080 than it does with the 1070. It has the same core clock, the same TDP, just a touch fewer CUDA cores, and in fact, all it has in common with the 1070 is the name and memory configuration. Even visually, it's almost identical to a GTX 1080 Founders Edition. Same cooler, same shroud, same overall length and width, same power connector. I mean, for all intents and purposes, this card feels more like a binned 1080 with cheaper GDDR5 rather than GDDR5X memory. And given how quickly it's been brought to market by the look of things, it probably is. But just because the product is a familiar face with a mustache and a funny wig, doesn't mean the business practices are anything we've seen before. So in the past, Founders Editions were more expensive, presumably to avoid competing with board partners that are building custom solutions like ASUS, EVGA, and MSI. But this time, the MSRP's are the same. Now there's nothing legally or even ethically wrong with this, but it's known in the biz as a dick move. And while consumers might not care about that, I mean, lower prices is better, right? This next one is a similar grade kick in their teeth. Do you guys remember Greenlight, NVIDIA's program limiting overclocking-friendly partner designs with unlocked voltages? Well, they are tightening their fist even further. Board partners are apparently now being told that they can no longer sell cards with a factory overclocked BIOS installed. NVIDIA! I'm sure you know this already, but this is a big load of bullsh**. I mean, look at poor EVGA's website. Everything from a base blower card to a water-cooled card ships with exactly the same clock speeds. And the rumor going around from even reputable sources like PCPurse, Ryan Shroudt, is that not only is every card clocked the same out of the box, relying on GPU boost for any performance gains. And from my understanding, these vendors aren't even allowed to bend the parts, right? So the higher-end cards don't get the best GPUs necessarily. It's kind of more luck of the draw here. What? I mean, what it feels like is they're trying to keep this card from being too good so that they can keep selling 1080s. Some partners are trying to work around this by bundling one-click overclocking software, but at worst, this screws over the users of platforms without available software overclocking tools, like Mac users with external GPU boxes, and at best, it's just adding more junk for the consumer to install to get the performance that they paid for. Whatever your reasons for doing this, Green Team, they're not good enough, and we don't like them. With all of that out of the way, the world does still need to know how this card performs though. So we grabbed our Kaby Lake and Ryzen test benches, along with a fine selection of recent GPUs to pit it against. So is it good enough to crush AMD's hopes and dreams? We start out with a solid, eh, it depends. On Ryzen, we got slightly better performance with Vega and Deus Ex Mankind divided in both 1080p and 1440p, while our Kaby Lake bench gave us more mixed results. Ryzen the Tomb Raider flips things around with the 1070 Ti pulling out ahead on both Ryzen and Core i7, that is until we look at DirectX 12 and 1440p, where once again the gap closes significantly and Vega even overtakes it. This trend continues all the way through our bench suite, with the Vega 56 either pretty close to 1070 Ti in For Honor and Ghost Recon Wildlands, or outright outperforming it, like at 1440p in Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Our synthetics are initially more kind to the 1070 Ti, with a higher result in Fire Strike Extreme and Time Spy, but Unigine's superposition gives the edge to Vega 56. As for productivity, Blender's Cycles renderer shows a clear preference for AMD, with Vega 56 shaving 15 seconds off the 1070 Ti's time to render the BMW and an even wider gap in the Classroom test. As for power consumption, it clearly favors the 1070 Ti though, with a cool 30 watt lower total system power draw than Vega 56, and an even wider gap of course compared to Vega 64. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty close to the GTX 1080, though its thermal performance under synthetic load actually winds up a little better. So, is it a Vega killer? Well, that's where it gets interesting. Based on supposed MSRP's, no. But when we consider Vega's ongoing availability and pricing issues, it actually doesn't do too badly at all. Not badly for Nvidia, that is. Both consumers and Nvidia's partners are kind of getting the shaft here. Speaking of getting the shaft, the last thing you want is to be using an airport's free Wi-Fi network, or you know, doing some emergency banking at that random cafe, and be giving away your personal information. Well, TunnelBear can solve this problem. It's the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. 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