The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAshes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)
A veteran from both our 2016 and 2017 game lists, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation remains the DirectX 12 trailblazer, with developer Oxide Games tailoring and designing the Nitrous Engine around such low-level APIs. The game makes the most of DX12's key features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. And with full Vulkan support, Ashes provides a good common ground between the forward-looking APIs of today. Its built-in benchmark tool is still one of the most versatile ways of measuring in-game workloads in terms of output data, automation, and analysis; by offering such a tool publicly and as part-and-parcel of the game, it's an example that other developers should take note of.
Settings and methodology remain identical from its usage in the 2016 GPU suite. To note, we are utilizing the original Ashes Extreme graphical preset, which compares to the current one with MSAA dialed down from x4 to x2, as well as adjusting Texture Rank (MipsToRemove in settings.ini).
For Ashes, the 20 series in general fare a little worse in their gains over the 10 series, with an advantage at 4K around 14 to 22%. Here, the Founders Edition power and clock tweaks are essential in avoiding any performance regression. For the RTX 2070, Founders Edition specs ensure that it is close enough to virtually tie the GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64, as opposed to lagging behind. The situation is largely similar to the RTX 2080 FE, which needs the tweaks to stay neck-and-neck to the 1080 Ti.
In other words, this scenario is exactly what the RTX 2070 needs to avoid, where it is slightly slower against both GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64. The card is already coming in with a price premium so it's important to firmly faster.
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beisat - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Thanks for the review, nice as always.Was hoping to upgrade my 970 before Turing was announced, but I feel like I'm getting ripped of with these cards. The review did nothing to change that feeling, but that was to be expected.
Luke212 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Please investigate why Turing is slower than Volta for HGEMM. If it was using the tensor cores they should be not that slow.SMOGZINN - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
On the "The Test" page you show that the "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition" is one of the cards being compared, but it does not show up in the benches.Targon - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
From the information, seeing Vega 64 going up to a temp of 86C would put it into thermal throttle range, which would cripple performance. From my own experience, manually adjusting the fan settings in Global Wattman to go up to 4500rpm and with a temperature target of 75C will avoid the throttle issues in the first place and also improving performance significantly, even without tweaking clock speeds or voltages.So, if Vega 64 is getting throttled and still hitting the numbers reported, that implies that with the fan profile adjusted as I suggested, we would be seeing Vega 64 doing a bit better in terms of framerates.
The_Assimilator - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Let's be honest: Vega isn't here for competition purposes, it's just included as a courtesy.atl - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Would be good to have some SLI & Cryptocurrency benchmarks includedTEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
These RTX cards are going to be a fantastic value......next summer when they drop the prices.
eva02langley - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Even there, I don`t know if Navi can really be a 250$ GPU with 1080 GTX performances.sandman74 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
980 owner here gaming at 1440p. Really wanted to upgrade but when I cost everything up, PC gaming has suddenly become a very expensive hobby.Decided to completely abandon the PC as a future gaming platform mostly thanks to the pricing of the new gpu cards.
2.5yrs since the 1080 for barely better performance. RTX isn’t viable on this card. My own view is the new line up sucks.
Practically all my mates are on consoles these days which is a shame but it’s a sign of the times. Tried the BF5 beta on my xbox one S and was blown away at how decent it was. Had real fun playing with friends which is what matters.
So I can only imagine it’s even better on the Xbox One X which you can buy for the price of just this GPU.
Prices have gone insane, so I’m stepping out. Total respect for those that can justify the prices and carry on PC gaming. I can’t.
The_Assimilator - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
tl;dr rather get a heavily discounted 1080 Ti (which will probably be factory overclocked and have a beefier cooler).