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) |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
281 Comments
View All Comments
eva02langley - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
At this point, until a GPU overhaul is made like Zen was for the CPU space, we are not going to see much changes. AMD will need to introduce chiplet design gpus for things to really change.sing_electric - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
How would a chiplet design really help GPUs, though? You don't have nearly the kind of I/O requirements on-chip for a GPU as you do a CPU. You're already massively parallel, and you can just shut off defective "cores" and put those parts in a lower bin; going to a 2 (or more) chip setup would probably just hurt performance.eva02langley - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
By making smaller chips, better yield, better binning, reducing waste... on multiple product.It is like designing a frame for multiple car model assembly. You are cutting cost and end up with better quality products...
Why chiplets? It is obvious as a business strategy.
jordanclock - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
If it's obvious, then I'm sure AMD has considered it and decided it doesn't make sense.Why does everyone in the comments act like they know better than entire teams of the world's best engineers?
Kevin G - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Chiplets require more expensive packaging and to really scale, you have to design with that concept in mind. Previously the cost-benefit from an engineering standpoint was simply to eat the cost going with larger dies and release harvested products due to the rarity of fully functional chips. The costs to migrate to newer nodes is increasing and the necessity of using multi-patterning have put tighter limits on how big chips can be. Chiplets are the way forward as they solve the current issues in manufacturing and the packaging doesn't carry the same premium as before.Gastec - Wednesday, July 17, 2019 - link
Chiplets and multi-GPU configs FTW! Also convince the electric companies to reduce the electricity bill by 50% :)Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I don't think a chiplet would help a consumer GPU much. Chiplets allow you to put more transistors than you otherwise would be able to. But consumer GPUs don't reach the reticle limit. More transistors would also increase the price of the GPUs. The cost per transistor isn't going down as much from node to node as it used to. So if AMD tried to boost performance by building a big chip with multiple chiplets it would be very expensive not only because of the complexity of chiplet technology but also because of the cost of all those transistors.What AMD needs to do is to continue to modify their architecture. The RDNA is a good first step. It's still behind NVIDIA in memory bandwidth, energy, and workload efficiency, but it looks like it makes a good jump over GCN in those areas.
eva02langley - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Seriously... everything you are saying is only your opinion. Chiplet is bringing better yield, better binning, reduce waste and end up giving more margins due to modularity.As of now, we have no clue what RDNA can provide, the reviews are not even out yet and it is the first kick at the can. If all the game industry is backing up AMD, guess what, there must be a reason for it.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Chiplets bring better yields, yes, but at the expense of worse power efficiency. If you put the chiplets on silicon interposers it's very expensive, too. So you must put them on less expensive subtrate and that affects the communication speed. Maybe when the technology is more mature it could make sense, but there's no sense to introduce the complexity now. In any case, AMD fans talk about chiplets as if AMD is the only one pursuing them. The whole industry is. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA,TSMC, everybody.Why do you say the game industry is "backing up AMD"? What does that mean?
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
Everything Yojimbo says is fact; eva02 you're clearly very poorly informed.