Product: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER - Founders Edition
Type: Graphics Card
Price: $860.00 AUD
Availability: July 9

The new RTX SUPER line is here, with the RTX series from NVIDIA now expanded to an impressive five different models. Seven if you count the soon-to-be phased out RTX 2070 and RTX 2080. One might be left wondering exactly, well, why? By offering a notable and well-timed performance boost to the trio that is the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080 – NVIDIA can make a case for the RTX line’s relevance against the looming prospect of ‘competition’. Especially when certain recently announced competitive offerings compare themselves to an RTX 2070 in terms of price and performance – a now defunct prospect.

Anyway, the real cause for excitement is that we’re beginning to see the benefits of NVIDIA diving head-first into real-time ray tracing as a right-now bit of tech. Rather than a sometime-in-the-future one. The new SUPER range comes just in time as more and more titles begin to implement cutting edge features like this. Take one look at Remedy’s Control on PC, which is first and foremost a great action game, and it’s hard to imagine playing that in RTX Off mode. It’s out next month and will leverage the RTX Turing architecture for real-time ray traced reflections, shadows, and lighting.

Which brings us to the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER. As we discovered whilst putting together our review it represents a similar sort of jump, performance-wise, that we see with the RTX 2060 SUPER. One that makes it comparable with GeForce GTX 1080 Ti – available for a lower price than the existing GeForce RTX 2070. And with the bonus of things like RT Cores and Tensor Cores and room for non-Founders Edition models to push its capabilities even further it’s worthy of the name SUPER.

Of Numbers and Heat Sinks

Much like how the RTX 2060 was far more powerful than its 10-series equivalent the GTX 1060, the RTX 2070 followed a similar trend when looking at the previous generation. Interestingly though the most apt comparison for the new SUPER version, outside of placing the results in the range of the still beastly GTX 1080 Ti - is with the new RTX 2060 SUPER. Which according to NVIDIA’s own information, is in-line performance wise (when gaming at the QHD resolution of 1440p) with the non-SUPER RTX 2070. Hence the All New GeForce RTX Line-Up announced today.

A card that, as highlighted in our review, is a 1080p powerhouse and more than capable at 1440p too. That said we’re still looking at a supped up RTX 2070, albeit one built off the TU104 GPU seen in the existing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080. Which again, makes it worthy of the new name.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER

• Architecture (GPU): Turing
  
• CUDA Cores: 2560
  
• Base Clock Rate: 1605 MHz
  
• GPU Boost Rate: 1770 MHz
  
• FLOPS: 9+9 TOPS (9.1 TFLOPS FP32 / 9.1 TFLOPS INT32)
  
• Tensor FLOPS: 72 TFLOPS
  
• Giga Rays/s: 7
  
• Memory Capacity: 8GB GDDR6
  
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 448 GB/s
  
• TDP: 215W

Compared to the RTX 2070 we see an increase in almost every department. From a CUDA Core count increase to 2560 from 2304, to a base clock jump to 1605 MHz from 1410 MHz, a boost in TFLOPS, and 7 Giga Rays instead of 6. This is a notable step up from the RTX 2070 seen when the new line debuted last year, and one that from what we can see makes this kind of like an RTX 2070 Ti – if such a thing were to exist. Except that it’s cheaper than the RTX 2070 and seemingly replaces it outright too. Assuming the new hardware results in a notable boost in performance, and spoiler alert – it does – the RTX 2070 SUPER has the added benefit of making the 70-line something to consider.

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"We’re beginning to see the benefits of NVIDIA diving head-first into real-time ray tracing as a right-now bit of tech. Rather than a sometime-in-the-future one."

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Not that the RTX 2070 was a flop, it just felt like the oft-neglected middle child. Unable to compete with the attention-seeking RTX 2060 and the much older and wiser and muscle-bound twins that were the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti.

But, before we dive head-first into a sea of bar charts and numbers that confirm the above, there is one visual change that comes with the new RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition – which at a glance looks almost identical to previous RTX releases from NVIDIA. Outside of the addition of the word SUPER that is. The new naming also sees a switch from the black and chrome look of the RTX 2070 Founders Edition to a chrome and reflective mirror-like finish. A nice touch, but also one that you’ll need to wipe for fingerprints after installation.

Onto the Numbers!

Game Performance

Which we’ll get to in a few more seconds so be patient. And hey, that means no scrolling down or looking at those sweet, sweet, bar charts until we say it’s okay. First some general housekeeping in the form of outlining the main specs for our test build – the same utilised for our RTX 2060 SUPER benchmarks.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition
  
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
  
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5
  
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix Elite 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4 3000 Memory

And sure, that’s more a listing of hardware than general housekeeping, but you get the idea. Anyway, here are the 1080p numbers.

Which as to be expected are in the realm of “spectacular” and “impressive”. Not sure why those were put in quotation marks, so just assume that we dubbed the 1080p performance of the new RTX 2070 SUPER, spectacularly impressive. And that we did it in the way a King or a Queen would bestow a title on a lord. “I now dub thee Sir Spectacular of the Impressive 1080p”. That sort of thing. Ahem.

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"Compared to the RTX 2070 we see an increase in almost every department. From a CUDA Core count increase to 2560 from 2304, to a base clock jump to 1605 MHz from 1410 MHz, a boost in TFLOPS, and 7 Giga Rays instead of 6."

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Compared to the already great 1080p output of the RTX 2060 SUPER the 2070 SUPER turns in mostly single-digit performance gains – which is due to well, 1080p and other hardware in our build being the bottleneck more than anything else. That said the visually intensive Metro Exodus still sees a sizable 18% gain, with 11% for The Division 2, and 12% for Forza Horizon 4. All three of which look spectacular running in ‘Ultra’ mode with HDR effects enabled. On the lower end of the spectrum DOOM only sees a 5% boost and Battlefield V 4%. Strangely Far Cry New Dawn ran basically the same at 1080p Ultra, but we’ll get to that anomaly later.

Upping the resolution to 1440p and the RTX 2070 SUPER improves with its performance gains over the RTX 2060 SUPER. Here a steady 60 frames-per-second is all but a guarantee too, with most titles sitting well above this. Outside of the usual culprits – those being Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at Ultra settings and Metro Exodus doing the same. The additional power of the RTX 2070 SUPER is best seen when considering the overall percentage drop-off in terms of performance when upping the resolution – in this case going from 1080p to 1440p. Here the drop off is only around 15% on average, an impressive feat.

Bumping this up to 4K and the drop-off is far more noticeable – sitting in the 35% range. That said with a 15% performance increase over the RTX 2060 SUPER, when it comes to native 4K gaming the RTX 2070 SUPER performs admirably. Our refusal to lower the visual detail settings aside, several of the titles we tested when paired with a G-Sync display ran remarkably smooth.

None of the above titles turned in less than 30 fps – and with both Overwatch and DOOM still managing to hit or get close to triple digits, the RTX 2070 SUPER begins to paint the picture of a highly versatile card. In much the same way the GTX 1080 Ti impressed when it debuted. Oh, and its only at 4K where Far Cry New Dawn manages to run noticeably quicker when compared to the RTX 2060 SUPER.

This naturally leads us into the next phase, and the promise land. That place the gods speak of - ray tracing. As per the 3D Mark benchmark figures above we see a 15% boost in Port Royal performance compared to the RTX 2060 SUPER and around a 10% increase when it comes to non-RTX tests like TimeSpy and FireStrike. With the new RTX line-up the jump from RTX 2060 SUPER to RTX 2070 SUPER is in line with expectations where it’s all about beefier high-res performance and the ability to better handle more advanced visual effects.

Ray Tracing and DLSS

As mentioned in the introduction of this review, ray tracing and the advanced capabilities of the new Turing architecture that powers the RTX line is starting to come into its own. In addition this month's Wolfenstein: Youngblood and next month’s release of Control – there’s also Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM Eternal, and Watch Dogs: Legion to look forward too. Titles that will offer immediate visual benefits for going ‘RTX on’.

With the above benchmarks captured at 1080p resolution with real-time ray tracing features set to high or max settings the RTX 2070 SUPER had no real issue maintaining a steady 60 frames-per-second. Something that when the technology debuted with Battlefield V was only possible with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Increasing the resolution to 1440p and much like with other benchmarks the RTX 2070 SUPER sees a bigger jump over the RTX 2060 SUPER when it comes to ray tracing performance.

It’s worth mentioning too that we completed all the Metro Exodus tests for this review using that game’s dedicated benchmark tool. Which admittedly seems to run, on average, a few frames slower than the actual game itself. Noticeably too, but for accuracy and the fact that it’s one of the most demanding benchmarks currently available, we stuck with it.

Overall

With the RTX 2070 SUPER taking over the RTX 2070 at a cheaper price-point, it might just be the most exciting of the new SUPER series of RTX cards from NVIDIA. Which we’ll know for sure once the RTX 2080 SUPER launches later this month. At 1080p and 1440p it’s a powerhouse, with decent 4K performance to boot. The improvements over last year’s RTX 2070 are commendable.

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"With the new RTX line-up the jump from RTX 2060 SUPER to RTX 2070 SUPER is in line with expectations where it’s all about beefier high-res performance and the ability to better handle more advanced visual effects."

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And when compared to the RTX 2060 SUPER, the clincher might just be the boost you get when it comes to ray tracing, as that’s the sort of thing that will ensure this card will last for the next couple of years at least. All in all, the RTX 2070 SUPER is a great card, and one that surprised us in terms of other aspects. Temperatures sat in the 70-73-degree range throughout our testing which was very welcome. The only area where the performance increase feels seemingly out of step with the rest of the build, comes with the increased 215 Watts of power required versus the RTX 2070’s 175 Watts. Minor sticking point aside it’ll be interesting to see where NVIDIA goes from here, and what the future might hold for RTX.

What the new RTX SUPER line has shown though, is that a revision can lead to a broader and more impressive range. With the RTX 2070 SUPER, and the RTX 2060 SUPER, the all new RTX line-up is a formidable one.