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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BenSkywalker - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Running Metro on the ultra setting using an RTX card is painful, RTX mode is *faster* and looks *way* better, why did you do this?Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
They didn't run anything with RTX on, probably because AMD cards don't have DXR drivers, yet, so there is no competition to compare it to. It would take a subjective judgment to say "using XYZ setting with RTX on looks better and runs faster, let's take a look at those numbers." There is a place in the games/hardware enthusiast sphere for some analysis along those lines, but Anandtech doesn't seem to try to fill that niche.BenSkywalker - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Oh, I must have been confused, I thought this was a review for new nVidia parts, I guess you are saying it's a feels feels article for people who own the lone four year old AMD part.......?Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Oh, I must have been confused. I thought I was talking to a reasonable person. Guess not, so I won't bother.BenSkywalker - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Use lower quality settings that are markedly slower, ignore both a significant portion of the die space and the relevant performance implications of said die space and purposefully avoid any RTX benches of an RTX card for an RTX review.That is what you are defending. Reasonable, if you think so :)
Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Benchmarks that can't be run on a wide variety of hardware are meaningless.If nVidia wants to include special features that only RTX cards can utilize, that's fine.
But there's no sense including them in a general-use benchmark, because there's only a tiny handful of cards that can use them, and they're all the same chip anyways.
I'm sure nVidia will be glad to tell you how many RTX Ops(bungholiomarks, whatever) the new cards get. It will remain a meaningless number.
Also, the performance implications of the die space are "lost shaders".
nVidia put this in solely for the compute market and THEN turnd around to try and figure out a gimmick they could sell it to gamers with to obscure the meaningful performance loss.
BenSkywalker - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Ray tracing is a feature of DirectX 12. Metro exodus is using the DirectX 12 implementation for ray tracing.DXR runs on non RTX cards just fine, simply requires driver support for a DirectX feature.
The ray tracing cores don't move the needle for general compute at all, don't know what helmet head told you that but they have no clue what they are talking about. The tensor cores, otoh, those are very useful for certain compute tasks, they are only used for denoising on the ray tracing side, they aren't the intersection compute units, the feature they bring to the table is DLSS and we can all ignore that forever and that's fine.
The key new feature for the next gen consoles, the big feature every engine developer is pushing for, what had been considered the holy grail of real time graphics for decades, that I don't get why you would ignore in an article with RTX as the subject.
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
If ray-tracing is so amazing... Where's the support?Phynaz - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Benching lowest common denominator is meaningless. Sorry if AMD can’t keep up.eva02langley - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Man, what a nice fanboy we got...