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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Phynaz - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
AMD Linux drivers are horribleMeteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
The market isn't huge, it's *miniscule*. It really is a rounding-error.AshlayW - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Long term Radeon Fan here. but probs gonna make the switch.That RTX 2070 Super looks awfully good to me. And I'm absolutely *in love* with the Turing reference card design, and the chrome/shiny Super one looks so good. Aaaaa what is wrong with me? Haha - I just feel this, plus some ability to use hardware RT on my 144 Hz 1080p monitor in Metro Exodus (Something I'm waiting to replay with DXR), and almost a 2080 for 200 bucks less.
We'll see what AMD cards are like, but 2070 Super is probably going to be faster than the 5700XT and with the added features etc, I feel it will offer the same or more value whilst giving me that ability to play with DXR.
Course, there's always the 3rd option of: Don't buy anything this year cuz all I play is Warframe and the RX 590 is giving me 120FPS+ in that. Buuuut...
The itch. It's real.
V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Must be tiring to always have your hopes up for the next card, and always having them turn out kinda meh.Good call, since it looks like a while before AMD will have something competitive. (Or something with hardware RT!)
As a future PS5 owner, In starting to get worried.
Korguz - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
V900.. the more tiring part.. is the over priced hardware that is out there.. gotta love lack of competition...Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
The future is Stadia...ballsystemlord - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
@Ryan Please run your full suite of compute benchmarks on the up coming 5700 series. It's important to me. Thanks!biodoc - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I agree. Thanks!Ryan Smith - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
To be sure, what would you like to see that wasn't in this article?ballsystemlord - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
For me personally, the folding @ home fp32 and fp64 are very revealing of a cards compute performance.I think AT authors were looking into it, but if you added a compute benchmark involving blender for 2019 I'd be tickled.
Thanks!