The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super & RTX 2060 Super Review: Smaller Numbers, Bigger Performance
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
The 2019 GPU Benchmark Suite & The Test
As we’re kicking off a new(ish) generation of video cards, we’re also kicking off a new generation of the AnandTech GPU benchmark suite.
For 2019 most of the suite has been refreshed to include games released in the last year. The latest iteration of the Tomb Raider franchise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is 2019’s anchor title and is the game used for power/temperature/noise testing as well as game performance testing. Also making its introduction to the GPU benchmark suite for the first time is an Assassin’s Creed game, thanks to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s extra-handy built-in benchmark.
For 2019 Ashes of the Singularity has been rotated out, so we’re empty on RTSes at the moment. But as an alternative we have Microsoft’s popular Forza Horizon 4, which marks the first time a Forza game has been included in the suite.
AnandTech GPU Bench 2019 Game List | ||||
Game | Genre | Release Date | API | |
Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Action/TPS | Sept. 2018 | DX12 | |
F1 2019 | Racing | Jun. 2019 | DX12 | |
Assassin's Creed Odyssey | Action/Open World | Oct. 2018 | DX11 | |
Metro Exodus | FPS | Feb. 2019 | DX12 | |
Strange Brigade | TPS | Aug. 2018 | Vulkan | |
Total War: Three Kingdoms | TBS | May. 2019 | DX11 | |
The Division 2 | FPS | Mar. 2019 | DX12 | |
Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open world | Apr. 2015 | DX11 | |
Forza Horizon 4 | Racing | Oct. 2018 | DX12 |
All told, I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of DirectX 12-enabled AAA games available this year. More than half of the benchmark suite is using DX12, with both AMD and NVIDIA cards showing performance gains across all of the games using this API. So this is a far cry from the early days of DX12, where using the low-level API would often send performance backwards. And speaking of low-level APIs, I’ve also thrown in Strange Brigade for this iteration, as it’s one of the only major Vulkan games to be released in the past year.
Finally, I’ve also kept Grand Theft Auto V as our legacy game for 2019. Despite being released for the PC over 4 years ago – and for game consoles 2 years before that – the game continues to be one of the top selling games on Steam. And even with its age, the scalability of the game means that it’s a heavy enough load to challenge even the latest video cards.
As for our hardware testbed, it too has been updated for the 2019 video card release cycle.
Internally we’ve made a pretty big change, going from an Intel HEDT platform (Core i7-7820X) to a standard desktop platform based around an overclocked Core i9-9900K and Z390 chipset. While we’ve used HEDT platforms for the GPU testbed for the last decade, HEDT is becoming increasingly irrelevant/compromised for gaming; while the extra PCIe lanes are nice, these platforms haven’t delivered the best CPU performance for games as of late.
By contrast, desktop processors with 8 cores now provide more than enough cores, and they also provide far better clockspeeds, delivering more of the single/lightly-threaded performance that games need. Furthermore, as SLI and Crossfire are on the rocks, the extra PCIe lanes aren’t as necessary as they once were.
On a side note, I had originally hoped to cycle in a Ryzen 3000 platform at this point, particularly for PCIe 4.0. However the timing of all of these hardware launches meant that we needed to go with an established platform, as it takes a week or so to build and validate a new GPU testbed. Plus with Ryzen 3000 not launching for another week, we wouldn’t have been able to use it for this review anyhow.
Otherwise the rest of our 2019 GPU testbed is relatively straightforward. With 32GB of RAM and a high-end Phison E12-based NVMe SSD, the system and any video cards being tested as well-fed. Enclosing all of this for our real-world style testing is our trusty NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
CPU: | Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Z390 Taichi |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Founders Edition AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 |
Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 431.15 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.6.3 |
OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1903) |
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tamalero - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
You mean the 1080ti right? the 2080 >= 1080TI, not vanilla 1080. Therefore 2070 super is closer to 1080TI territory.Samus - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
The catch is on the used market you can pickup 1080 (non-Ti) for <$300. I recently picked one up for $250 off Facebook Market, and I've seen 1070Ti's for $200.It's mostly people dumping and buying into the ray tracing train. And even with these cards, as fast as they are, you still need to spend a LOT (hundreds more) for a card not significantly more powerful than a 1080.
Opencg - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
i meant the 2080 since that is the performance target of the 2070 super. stock to stock is close if you compare to a 2080 with 1710mhz boost. but many are clocked 1800 or higher and the overclocking headroom will still be much better on the old 2080 vs the 2070 super. its the same chip and you run into the frequency wall at the same range. the 2070 super just has less cores.Gastec - Wednesday, July 17, 2019 - link
King of value my ass! The GTX 1080 Ti has always been too expensive and these RTX cards are just obscene. But that's what happens when they trick you with anchoring.If you don't understand, go watch "Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play" video on YouTube and skip to 12:27
bchiemara - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
I bought the 2070 super for the ray tracing hardware, which the 1080 Ti does not have and doing ray tracing in software the 1080 Ti can't compete with the 2060 let alone the 2070 or the Super cards.techxx - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Yup. RTX cards are still priced as if they launched 3 years ago. Pathetic Nvidia and even more pathetic consumers who give them a dime. Nvidia completely destroyed the GPU market where only fools buy into it.PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
As someone that plays computer games just fine on crappy, slow iGPUs like Bay Trail graphics or a Radeon HD 6310, I can safely say that you can waste just as many hours of your life rotting away behind slow, cheap hardware if you're the slightest bit selective about the titles you pick to play on your hardware so yes, there is literally zero reason to give a flying you-know-what about what graphics card does what or even really care overly much about the sort of computer you currently own as long as the stupid thing boots up and all its buttons work.Qasar - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
the games i play.. wouldn't work as well on vid cards like the ones you use Peach :-) to graphically intensive, and when your turn the eye candy down.. kind of looks like games from the mid 90s in DOS....Questor - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
Exactly!Santoval - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Branding matters significantly. *You* might buy RTX 2080/2070 Trash, but most people will definitely not. You might not care but Nvidia surely does.