Review of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition: average price, high-end

When NVIDIA first announced its Turing-based GeForce RTX 20 series, three GeForce RTX models were unveiled: the 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 models. As we saw earlier, Turing and the GeForce RTX 20 series in all of them are hardware-based and software-grade for real-time game casting, as well as other new specialized features, though not all of them have been introduced into games yet. Nevertheless, the release of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 last month finally revealed their place on the spectrum of traditional performance. As a value-oriented enthusiast product, the RTX 2070 is arguably the most important card for most potential buyers. So, in anticipation of tomorrow's launch, we are now looking at the GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition.

Even if the value option, which is historically the case for the x70 part, the RTX 2070 Founders edition is priced at 599 USD, with a standard PDSF at 499 USD. For all intents and purposes, the lower price of US $ 499 will not be visible in the near future as AIBs will be aligned with NVIDIA to avoid cannibalization and PSA reduction. In any case, the $ 500 bar makes it clear that "value" and "cheap" do not necessarily mean the same thing.

For the RTX 2070, its value would be measured by both traditional rasterization performance and hybrid rendering performance. For the first, the GeForce GTX 1080 is at the price point of $ 500, making it a card to beat, AMD Radeon Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1070 Ti also offering similar performance levels. Beating the GTX 1080 with a large margin will offer more to those who still use older generation cards, such as the GTX 970 and 980. However, trading with the GTX 1080 would leave the RTX 2070 in a situation where its price would be higher with less availability for equivalent traditional performance. By the way, the HDR format has a problem, the RTX 20 series being less powerful, but the difference varies depending on the games and only a selection of games supports the HDR format.

Unfortunately, the accuracy of hybrid rendering remains a mystery. The games have not yet supported the features of the RTX platform and DXR is just starting to be deployed as part of the Windows 10 October 2018 (1809) update, itself delayed due of data loss problems. RTX platform features, such as real-time ray tracing and DLSS, incur high costs; At the present time, the RTX 2080 Ti stands at $ 1,200, the RTX 2080 at $ 800 and the RTX 2070 at $ 600 is now the entry card for these features. So, for players interested in using real-time ray tracing, we still do not know what to expect when it comes to hybrid rendering performance in the real world; In any case, the RTX 2070 does not support SLI, which prevents any subsequent upgrade by mGPU. In other words, if the RTX 2070's frame rate / frame rate target for real-time ray tracing is significantly lower than the RTX 2080 Ti or 2080, it will not be easy to double the number of 2070 options. .

Whatever the case may be, the RTX 2070 is built on its own graphics processor, the TU106, rather than being a simplified version of the TU104, and offers numbers that account for 75% of the resources. shading / texturing / tensing the RTX 2080 with the same number of ROPs and 256-bit memory buses. Given the heavy nature of ray tracing workloads, it would be interesting to investigate once real-time ray tracing and DXR rendering will be fully available to the public in games.

But as a direct upgrade, the RTX 2070 is in a delicate situation. We already know where the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are in terms of classic gaming performance; the RTX 2080 Ti is the carousel of the Titan V, while the RTX 2080 is comparable to the Titan Xp and GTX 1080 Ti. As the two most powerful cards on the stack, there's a lot of room for maneuvering with bonuses, but the RTX 2070 does not have that luxury as part x70, and will be in Pascal's mix with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Ti in the range from $ 450 to $ 600, with the GTX 1080 Ti models at the $ 700 mark. The GTX 1080 priced at $ 490 could be an important spoiler in case of launcher inventory issues, which has already caused delays in the RTX 2080 Ti.

Beyond this, the biggest outstanding issues concern RTX platform features such as real-time ray tracing and DLSS. Players who plan to take the plunge will look at the RTX 2070 as an entry point, but for the moment, there is no clear and generalizable way to determine what this entry-level performance would look like. in the real world.