Nvidia's RTX 2070 Delivers 2016 Performance, Currently Unnecessary Features and Significant Price Increases

$ 438 on Newegg, which means that the 2070 must demonstrate significant performance gains to align it. With a base price of $ 600, we want the RTX 2070 to offer at least 1.38 times more performance than the GTX 1080 to be a good buy.

The table – not to mention the reviews – confirms that it's not something RTX 2070 can actually do. Anandtech delivers the bad news in one paragraph.

To get back to the numbers, the TDP RTX 2070 Founders Edition and clock enhancements only represent a gain of about 4% compared to the 2070 reference at 4K. The difference is not great in the grand scheme of things, but the setup makes more sense when you look at the GTX 1080 competition. The RTX 2070 reference is faster than the GTX 1080 in 4K and 1440p by about 10%, a gap that is easily filled by custom cards overclocked at the factory.

The comparison will not improve if we check for relative upgrades from generation to generation for the x70 family. Anand points out that while the GTX 1070 has recorded a 1.57x performance increase of 1440p over the GTX 970, the GTX 2070 can only handle an increase of 1.36x compared to the GTX 1070. Look at the calculation. We will use FE cards at the highest prices to improve the comparison for Nvidia.

Launch price of the GTX 970: $ 329
Launch price of the GTX 1070: $ 449
GTX 2070 Introductory Price: $ 600

In 2016, you could buy a performance increase of 1.57x for a price increase of 1.36x. Today, you can buy a 1.36-fold increase in performance for a 1.33-fold increase in price over the GTX 1070 introductory price. Except that, of course, the GTX 1070 is only plus a launch map. It is currently selling $ 339 – which means the real The price / performance ratio for this comparison is a 1.76-fold increase in price for a 1.36-fold increase in performance.

This is not convincing. It will never be convincing.

The RTX 2070 is a dangerous card to buy to support new features

The problem with the RTX 2070 is that Nvidia has charged a high price without demonstrating beforehand that the graphics processor will actually be able to handle all the features of the next generation. This is not an accessory point. At the launch of Nvidia for the RTX family, it was widely observed that tracer-enabled games like Battlefield V were "around" 60 frames per second, but many critics said they did not think the frame rate was constant.

It would be inappropriate to treat this data point as the last word on RTX's performance, but we can infer reasonable assumptions. First, suppose that better support for drivers and games, as well as some adjustments to the effect itself, will improve performance enough for a RTX 2080 to perform the same 60-fps RTX 2080 Ti. Nvidia's "RTX-Ops" is not significant, but as this is the meaningless number we have, we know that the RTX 2080 Ti is capable of generating 76,000 billion "RTX-Ops", while the RTX 2080 is capable of 57,000 billion. This is an advantage of 1.33x in terms of performance for the 2080 Ti. Therefore, when we say that we assume the RTX 2080 can take over, we assume that Nvidia has had a lot of optimization work to do.

But even this generous assumption leaves the RTX 2070 in a free fall. It only has 78% of the RTX 2080's ray tracing performance, which means players can expect to gain about 47 fps in 1080p with their all-new $ 600 video card. As we discussed in our review of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the story overwhelmingly indicates that taking a bet on a new generation feature by trying to subscribe to a low level rarely works. If you do not believe me, ask an owner of 8800 GTS if he was happy to see the GPUs they bought for $ 400 in 2006, blown overboard by a $ 300 card barely a year later .

In mathematics, maths rarely lie. There is still a possibility of hidden traps and bottlenecks, but if the RTX 2070 displays 55% of the 2080 Ti's RTX performance, it is safe to assume that it will likely deliver between 45% and 65% of the RTX 2080's performance. Ti. But at the present time, the only data point we have on this map is that under BFV, the RTX 2080 Ti at $ 1,200 has struggled to maintain a frame rate of 60 frames per second. We assume that Nvidia and Dice will improve these numbers. They may not do it. If they can not, a RTX 2070 could end up shooting 30Frequency of frames per second in BFV @ 1080p with activated ray tracing. This is not a reasonable feat for a $ 600 GPU.

I made it clear that I did not think players should buy Turing GPUs. Price increases are not remotely justified by the available performance and the future value of ray tracing and DLSS is a total unknown. But I'll say this: the more you care about ray tracing and performance in this mode, the more you should buy a RTX 2070. If you doubt it, do yourself a favor and check out the reviews of DirectX 10 and even some DX11 GPUs , like the HD 5770. That's common for mid-range cards to struggle in the new APIs. And ray tracing, as Nvidia has noted, is more than a simple API change: it requires extensive silicon support, specialized hardware, and features that are just beginning.

If you really care about future performance, expect. Do not buy the sizzle. Do not accept the idea that Nvidia would not send a GPU with a technical ray tracing capability that could hardly be used. in use for launching rays. It is quite possible that games offer different levels of ray tracing to target different GPUs, but since we do not know if this will happen or how good it will be, if any.. The RTX 2070 could offer rather insignificant levels of support, while the stunning effects of Battlefield V require a more expensive $ 200 to $ 600 graphics processor.

The paradox of Turing is that Nvidia may be perfectly right in his efforts to push the video game industry to adopt ray tracing. It could be that in 10 years we would all collapse into games that only use ray tracing or deploy it intensively alongside pixelation for an unparalleled gaming experience. I do not refute in any way the idea that ray tracing can be an exciting future technology for games.

But that does not mean that Turing will deliver it. And it is very difficult to recommend a graphics processor that offers a slight improvement in performance compared to the latest generation, with no guarantee that it will be fast enough when running next generation features to be able to use them. A number of sites have published written reviews of RTX 2070 – [H]ardOCP also has its own cover, which you can read here.

Now read: RTX Review 2080 and 2080 Ti: You can not polish a Turing, Nvidia will keep Pascal GPUs on store shelves after the launch of RTX and will not buy the hype around the Nvidia RTX 2080