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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scineram - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
All the development costs have already been accounted for in R&D spending. Vega has way too many OEM costumers, even if they can gamer cards, to cease production. Those have better margins.Korguz - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
" Nvidia’s problem is that Turing was “too good”, so many gamers out there are hanging on to their 1070’s and 1080’s and don’t see a reason to upgrade. " heh.. i have a 1060, and i would need to go to at least a 2070, but at those prices.. its out of my price range...V900 - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
What’s your budget?Because I have a feeling there’ll be quite a few uses 2060s and 2070s available soon. ;)
Anyways, the 2060S is available for 399$, which is a reasonable price considering it’s basically a 2070.
The 2070S is the old 2080, and would be a decent upgrade at a reasonable price. ($499 for a high end card is pretty standard pricing.)
Korguz - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
around the $500 cdn mark.. and cause of that, and the part that the 2070's start at what looks like $680, it will be a while before my 1060 is upgraded. im not the only one either.. most of my friends would like to upgrade their cards too.. but the price of the 20 series.. is also too expensive for them as well...Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
The Super series is because the original 20x series wasn't a big enough improvement to justify upgrading, for sure.But the timing, within a week of RX 5700, is obviously deliberate.
I think we all agree that AMD will have to cut the prices of 5700s or they will sell very few. But they do not have big margins not on 7nm. Quite possibly they might not have the margins to make much of a price cut.
If the RX 5700 hadn't come along, we'd have been waiting much longer for the Super series.
Korguz - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
" The Super series is because the original 20x series wasn't a big enough improvement to justify upgrading, for sure " yes.. because nvidia, priced most of the 20 series out of most of its customers reach... and the super series.. is STILL out of most peoples price range VS what they have now, and there for, cor the price.. isnt worth it" But they do not have big margins not on 7nm. " and you read this where ? or is it just your own speculation ?
V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Navi would have been pretty DOA irregardless of the Super cards.But nah, I don’t see them lowering the prices. Why would they?
Between the hardcore AMD fans who’d never get an Nvidia card regardless of performance, and the folks who need something good at compute at a reasonable price, they’ll move enough Navi cards to make a pretty penny.
Navi isn’t a market share play kind of card.
It’s a “gimme those 40% margins” kinda play.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I don't think you realize how much it costs to tape out a 7 nm chip let alone how much it costs to develop a new GPU architecture. There are no 40% margins without volume sales.Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I mean maybe they can have a 40% gross margin but that's not very useful if they don't have any operating income. There would be no healthy operating margin without volume sales.GreenReaper - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Why? If you don't care about RTX support, but do care about free and open source driver support on Linux. Admittedly not a huge market, but it's there.