The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super & RTX 2060 Super Review: Smaller Numbers, Bigger Performance

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.

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.