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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biodoc - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Thanks Ryan!Amoro - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
So 215w TDP equals 302 watts normal gaming load. Right...Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
The power measurements here are of the complete system, not just the GPU.Amoro - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
My mistake. I take it back. I should read. It's actually really close then.Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
:-)dcole001 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
With the Benchmarks now finally out. Navi is DOA if they don't reduce pricing. Why would anyone buy 5700 XT that is going to have less performance and no hardware Raytrace Support. RTX 2070 Super is best value card out there. Got $100 price drop (Foundation Edition) and 15% boost in Performance. With very little overclocking you get the Performance of the RTX 2080 Standard Addition for $499!! Best Deal out there and it is the Founders Edition which has higher Quality GPU.Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Well, we haven't seen the Navi tests yet, but AMD will surely have to reduce pricing for it. That seems to be NVIDIA's thrust here. It's not the first time they've done it.V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Doubt this release has anything to do with Navi.Nvidia has over 80% of the market, AMD isn’t really a concern. Heck, in the upper market level, it’s virtually a monopoly.
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.
The Super RTX cards is aimed at those guys.
And I’m not so sure we will see a price cut for Navi.
A: They don’t have that much room to cut the price of Navi. Why risk canibalizing RX series sales?
B: At the current price, Navi gives them a fat, juicy margin. Lowering the price might move a few extra units, but hurt their total profits.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
The timing shows it has a lot to do with Navi. NVIDIA only has a dominant market share as long as they defend it. Navi is AMD's most competitive product in a while, and it is currently targeting the most profitable part of the stack.We must see a price cut for Navi or they won't sell many and they will build up inventory. he other option is to stop making them, which doesn't do anything to reduce the fixed costs of r&d for the chip. AMD will try to maximize their profits/minimize their losses, or they might even try to gain some market share if the feel they are financially in good enough shape to do that. By RX sales do you mean Vega? There are hardly any Vega sales to begin with. They want Navi to be far more successful than Vega was. They will simply stop making Vega or take a write down on them if they have to in order to get Navi out the door.
At current price Navi gives them almost no profit because when you have minuscule sales but large r&d costs you can sell each one for $10,000 and still lose money. They must cut the price in order to turn any profit.
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
Minimising losses may well be AMD's goal, I fear :-/