GEFORCE RTX 2070 FE
Nvidia’s mid-range ray-tracer hits the testing labs
WE’VE BEEN SPOILED by the past several generations of Nvidia graphics cards, particularly with the GTX 970 and GTX 1070. The 970 was faster than the previous generation, and even came close to the Titan Black, with a price of only $330. The 1070 proclaimed superior performance to every prior card, including the Maxwell Titan X, with a starting price of $380. Those were good times. The RTX 2070, and the Founders Edition in particular, make us long for the days of previous Nvidia GPU advances.
To be fair, the RTX 2070 packs a lot of new technology into its beefy package. The TU106 chip is only slightly smaller than the GP102 in the 1080 Ti, and includes the new Tensor and RT cores, which help to accelerate machine learning and raytracing calculations. But as with the other Turing GPUs, we’re still waiting for the games to arrive. Nvidia has a list of 25 games slated to support DLSS, and 11 games with ray-tracing support. Several of those are already available, but as we go to print, the patches to enable DLSS and/or ray tracing still haven’t arrived.
It’s difficult to say precisely how any of the RTX family of cards perform with ray tracing or DLSS. We’ve done some preliminary testing using Nvidiaprovided demos, and if the results hold for actual games, DLSS could boost performance by about 40 percent over TAA, thanks to rendering at half the resolution, and using an AI-enhanced upscaling and antialiasing algorithm. Comparing image quality, in motion it’s difficult to spot the difference between 4K DLSS and 4K TAA, though comparing screenshots, there’s clearly some compromise—some aspects look better with DLSS, others look better with TAA. Still, it’s a net win, and the RTX 2070 with DLSS even outperforms a GTX 1080 Ti with TAA. But it’s apples versus oranges.
Ray tracing shows even greater gains, with the StarWars elevator demo running more than three times as fast on the RTX 2070 compared to the GTX 1080 Ti. The catch is that we’re talking about 35fps on the 2070 compared to 10fps on the 1080 Ti, at 1440p. Three times as fast in ray-tracing performance sounds great, but given the choice between traditional rasterization techniques at 60–100fps or ray tracing at 30–40fps, most gamers will take higher frame rates.
Even with all the new features in Turing, it’s first-gen hardware. By the time ray-
tracing support in games really starts to gain traction, we may have second or even third-generation hardware that makes the current RTX cards look pitiful. And it’s not like games are going to switch to ray tracing only any time soon, because all previous graphics cards can’t reasonably support the technology. That leaves us with RTX 2070 performance that only just edges past the GTX 1080.
Kudos to Nvidia for pushing into new frontiers with the Turing architecture, because someone had to do it. If you’re looking to build a new PC or upgrade from a graphics card that’s a couple of generations old, the RTX 2070 isn’t a bad option, especially if you skip the Founders Edition, and go for a reference model, such as EVGA’s 2070 Black. You lose the factory overclock, but we easily made up for that with manual overclocking, adding 150MHz on the core and 500MHz (15GT/s effective) on the GDDR6.
The RTX 2070 is arguably the best $599 graphics card available right now, especially with the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti being phased out. But if you already own a GTX 1070 or faster, we’d skip the 2070, and hold off for the inevitable secondgen RTX cards. The first generation isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely underwhelming and expensive. –JARRED WALTON