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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V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Ah yes, you could do similar tricks with Pentium CPUs back in the day, or sometimes just by flicking a DIP switch to get a 600$ processor out of your 200$ processor.Overclocking actually made sense then.
Sadly, those days are long gone.
Koenig168 - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Not that long ago. The GTX 690 was launched only 7 years ago. I was tempted to try the Quadro mod for fun but eventually sold the card as is when I switched to Pascal.Kvaern1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Still only 8GB RAM on the 2080...I have a 1080 and running @ 3440*1440 I've never had to turn down graphics settings a single notch due to FPS issues but I've had to due to lack of VRAM on a few occasions...
Beaver M. - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
8 GB is fine for the 2060. But not fine for the 2070 and 2080. They should both have at least 11 GB. And the 2080 Ti should have at least 14.I am happy for the people who bought a 1080 Ti. They have a card with a very long breath. I wish I would have been so smart and bought one when they were around $600 to $700.
solnyshok - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
I bought one, used, for $350 about 6 months ago.biodoc - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Is FAHbench part of the new benchmarks suite? It is of interest to those of us into scientific computing.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Is it not. It hasn't been updated in a couple of years now, so I've tossed it out.However if there's a newer, similar benchmark you'd like to see, then I'd be eager to hear it. The current GPU compute benchmark situation is rather ugly.
catavalon21 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I was wondering the same thing. My GPUs spend as much time mapping the stars, looking for little green men, and working to cure disease as they do playing games. With this being one of the few sites that puts any compute benchmarks into GPU reviews (for which I am grateful), I would be fine with you keeping an older compute test or two. I'm not sure crunching for science (in whatever realm) sees apps change as often as games, and for those of us who do that, I don't think we'll complain. I understand every benchmark takes time to run, just know there are those of us who do look forward to F@H tests. Or, maybe I'm just stuck in the past, where for years, in EVERY new GPU review, I anxiously looked to see if THIS would be the card that could run Crysis :-)biodoc - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
FAHBench is based on core21 which is still the current workhorse for molecular dynamics simulations at Folding@Home. There is a new core22 in development but it is still in beta testing. I do see links to Anandtech's FAHbench results in multiple forums including the folding forum at Stanford so it is still important to those of us that support science with our GPUs.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Very interesting. That's good to know! I was under the impression that the project had already discarded core21. FAHBench is easy enough to run, so that wouldn't be too hard to re-integrate.