Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Edition Founder's Review

By Matt Clark

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The new Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Turing GPUs have naturally dominated the conversation in recent months, but while the flagship maps and their impressive specifications are impressive, they are also prohibitively expensive for most people. Fortunately, Nvidia had a more economical Turing option that was waiting behind the scenes in the form of the RTX 2070. It will be available in the Edition version of the founder, which is what I have for this review, and from the partners of Nvidia (EVGA, Asus, etc.). Although the founder's edition costs $ 600, Nvidia says partner cards should start at $ 500. This GPU will not offer the shooting speeds of its more expensive siblings, especially for the 4K game, but it remains compatible with future technology, such as real-time ray tracing. I spent some time with the smallest Nvidia RTX series card and I'm pleased to announce that it really deserves your attention.

RTX 2070 – Design and Features

As is the case for all RTX-based cards, the RTX 2070 will ultimately offer real-time ray tracing and DLSS compatibility thanks to its new architecture. Turing. Ray tracing allows game developers to create more realistic lighting scenarios in their games. DLSS should allow artificial intelligence to create more perfect images in games while lightening the GPU burden. The new Tensor cores of RTX series cards will be able to interpret the data generated by Nvidia's artificial intelligence, eliminating the need for performance-reducing anti-aliasing. Again, this technology has not yet been implemented in the real world to date, but a number of current and future games are committed to integrating the technology at a later date.

While it's hard to say how ray tracing and DLSS will unfold in the future, it's a little more frustrating when it comes to the RTX 2070. This card has 36 RT cores (which power beam tracing) and 288 Tensor cores, compared to the 46 RT cores and 368 Tensor cores in the RTX 2080, for example. It is clear that the RTX 2070 will not handle the technology or the larger GPUs, but it is impossible to know how this will affect the performance of these forward-looking technologies.

In addition to the upcoming features, the RTX 2070 is a much smaller card than the RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti. Compared to the giants that are the Zotac RTX 2080 Ti AMP or the Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080Ti OC, the RTX 2070 is downright tiny. With a total length of about nine inches, this card is actually shorter than most high-end graphics cards, which typically start at around 10.5 "and go up to 12" in general. This could certainly be useful if you are looking for a more compact version.

Like the other RTX Founder's Edition cards, the RTX 2070 has a very attractive aluminum fairing. The only light is on the side of the card, a nice green glow illuminating the GeForce RTX logo. Without a doubt, the partner cards will add more lighting to the mix, but I must remember that these RTX Founder's Edition cards have a modern and elegant look.

RTX 2070 – Specifications

The RTX 2070 Founder Edition features 2,304 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 14Gbit / s memory clock and a factory-overloaded 1710MHz clock. The reference frequency specified on the RTX 2070 is 1620 MHz. Therefore, as with the other RTX Founder Edition cards, a 90 MHz overclock has been integrated in the jump. Comparatively, the GTX 1070 had 1920 CUDA cores and 8 GB of memory, but it was the GDDR5 that was running at a much slower memory clock of just 8 Gbps. Add the RT and Tensor cores previously mentioned, and there is no doubt that the RTX 2070 offers improvements over its predecessor.

Unlike the RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti, the RTX 2070 does not offer NVLink for SLI execution. But on the back of the card, you'll find two DisplayPort 1.4, a USB Type-C port for VR headsets, an HDMI 2.0b port and even a DVI connection. The latter does not appear in the RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti Founder editions. The power supply is managed by a single eight-pin connector, placed at the opposite end of the I / O of the card. This may sound a bit odd, as most cards place electrical connections on the side of the card, but given the small size of the RTX 2070, this is not a problem.

RTX 2070 – Landmarks

The Nvidia RTX 2070 was analyzed according to the same configuration used to test all other Turing cards. The IGN test bench includes a Skylake Core i7-7700K processor, 16GB of DDR4 memory, an Asus Z270 Prime motherboard, an Intel SSD and an EVGA power supply. I've tested this map (and all others) at resolutions of 3840 x 2160, 2560 x 1440 and 1920 x 1080 with all the games and criteria set on their highest graphical settings but without the l & # 3939; anti-aliasing enabled. Moreover, because of the emotions of the readers, I upgraded the RAM of the test bench from 8 GB to 16 GB, but for this series of tests, the values ​​of 16 GB were inexplicably a little lower only for previous GPUs (1080 Ti and less), and I've tried all the cards again, for several nights, without change. I therefore use the previous figures obtained during benchmarking with 8 GB of RAM. When I restarted the tests, the delta was less than 1%. The numbers are therefore always representative of what you can expect from these GPUs. You can see the results in the charts below:

First of all, while there has been much discussion of other RTX series cards that focus on running 4K games at speeds above 60 frames per second, this obviously does not translate into the RTX 2070. Nvidia said this card was intended for 2560 x 1440 resolutions, and the benchmarks seem clearly in line with this configuration. That being said, Pascal cards like the GTX 1080 have had no problem reaching more than 60 frames per second with 1440p games, so this is a similar performance (at the GTX 1080) with the promise of RTX for the future.

Overall, the RTX 2070 is a little faster than the GTX 1080, but still slower than the GTX 1080 Ti. For 1440p games, the RTX 2070 is about 5 to 11% faster than the GTX 1080. The margins between the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080 are surprisingly narrow when it comes to quad-HD resolution. in the range of five percent on average. Admittedly, when you take into account the 4K resolution, things change considerably in favor of RTX 2080.

In a 20-minute load test with Heaven 4.0, the RTX 2070 reached a maximum temperature of 74 degrees and a max clock of 1890 MHz. These conditions are consistent with other editions of RTX Founder, and are not really a concern. Overall, I found this card very quiet and I hardly noticed that it worked during the tests.

Buying Guide

the GeForce RTX 2070 Founder's Edition the $ 600 MSRP when it becomes available. Partner cards will also be sold by the usual suspects, but they are not yet available. For now, you can subscribe to Nvidia's updates when it's released.