NVIDIA GTX 2070
Is this GPU poised to be the new price/performance gaming king? Chris Szewczyk is in the Labs to find out.
Back in September this year, Nvidia’s RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti made their long-awaited debut. While we were impressed with the cards and their forward-looking technologies, their high prices were definitely a downer. The GeForce RTX 2070 goes some way to addressing that, though the cheapest versions are still well over $800, leaving RTX 2070s priced too high to unequivocally recommend compared to the previous Pascal generation. For now though, The RTX 2070 is the cheapest way to jump onboard the Turing train.
Nvidia has departed from its recent tradition of equipping the x70 card with a cut down variation of the GPU found in the x80 version, like we saw with the GTX 970 and 980, and GTX 1070 and 1080. This time the RTX 2070 makes use of an entirely separate GPU, the TU106. This is a significantly smaller GPU than the TU104 found in the RTX 2080, helping Nvidia save on manufacturing costs. It also gives Nvidia more freedom to release other SKUs in the future. Who wants to bet that we’ll see a RTX 2070 TI using a cut down TU104 and RTX 2060 Ti using a cut down TU106?
The RTX 2070 makes use of the full TU106 die without any disabled features. It comes with 2,304 CUDA cores, 288 Tensor cores and 36 RT cores. It makes use of 8GB of GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit bus, identical to the RTX 2080. Power consumption has risen compared to the GTX 1070, but on the other hand, its reasonably thrifty compared to the 215-225w of the RTX 2080. Note that the RTX 2070 doesn’t have and NV-Link or SLI fingers as it’s not supported.
The Tensor and RT cores are at the heart of what Nvidia is trying to achieve with Turing. Tensor cores are designed to accelerate AI and deep-learning applications. We’re yet to see how these cores will impact gameplay though we’re impressed with Deep-Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) which delivers very high quality AA levels without taxing the GPU the way traditional AA does. The RT cores are obviously used for ray tracing applications. There are a few demos on the web that are well worth checking out to see just how gorgeous some of the new technologies are. There are plenty of games coming that make use of RTX features including Battlefield V and Metro Exodus.
While a lot of the forward looking features are very impressive, their real world performance is still largely unknown. The previous generation GTX 1000 series cards still offer tremendous gaming performance, making a card like the RTX 2070 a side-grade for some users. Time will tell if the RTX 2070 matures like a fine wine. We hope we’ll see all that potential put to good use.
We’ve got our hands on a selection of RTX 2070 models from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. They are joined by the rarer RTX 2070 Founders Edition. Read on as we take a look at what may be the most important RTX model of all.