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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UltraLeader - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
nVidia should release 2080Ti Super with 7,500 CUDA cores. No one care ray tracing that run below 60 FPS !!! and remove DLSS !! crap tech !!atiradeonag - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
Some ppl get pretty jelly seeing 2070S beating their flagshipMeteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
Who?Sychonut - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
These would have performed admirably on Intel's 14+++++ node.FMinus - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
tech press needs to give more shit to both Nvidia and AMD for pricing this shit so high. xx60 class for $400 c'mon, this was once $250-300. Same goes for AMD, but they are just price matching -10%, but they'd price just as high if they were on the top, it's just going out of hand. And let's not even get into the "higher" end cards, because prices there are just beyond help. Majority of the people on this planet don't earn enough to even buy the 2070, let alone 2080 or 2080Ti, let alone the new 2060 Super. It's beyond belief and the tech press is quiet and even praises them for delivering all of this at this prices, because it's 10-15% faster...Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
It's no different than with CPUs. Improvements are harder to find. For sure, cards *are* faster per price with each new generation.Improved architectures and smaller processes have allowed more fps in the ~300W limit, resulting in new higher pricing tiers. But all cards, at all price levels, are faster.
Questor - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
And prices are still too high.And RTX is still not a thing.
And once again, Nvidia buyers take it rough, dry and end up with a sore backside.
It's amazing to me. Nvidia speeds them up a bit, runs roughshod over their customers keeps prices still too high and suddenly everyone and their goldfish is praising Nvidia like they are the second coming here to save us all from life in the pit of hell. Not buying it, literally and figuratively.
Just say, "NO!"
Nfarce - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
I'm going to say NO to your comment. I want the best for MY MONEY. AMD does not provide. Period and end of discussion.Korguz - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
so you are happily paying nvidia's prices then ?? wow.. must be nice to have more money then you know what to do with....eastcoast_pete - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
Just saw this on videocardz.com, which often gets leaked (and correct) information, about AMD supposedly lowering the prices of its Navi cards for the July 7th launch. Verbatim, copied from their posting:"The information on new pricing is under embargo till July 6th. We will let know you know as soon as we hear more.
Update, new pricing (two confirmations):
RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary: $449
RX 5700 XT: $399
RX 5700: $349"
As they write, the information is under embargo until tomorrow (so Ryan can't write about it if he still wants to get pre-release review samples to test), but they (videocardz) seem to not be so troubled about spilling the beans.
If true, I like to say (even as a critic of NVIDIA and its over-pricing when they can): Thank you, NVIDIA. Let's hope these price cuts by AMD are true, and that this is the beginning of a long-overdue price war!