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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hansmuff - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Great review making some very pointed and smart commentary. Thank you!Hixbot - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Nvidia are not even interested in competing with themselves.shabby - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
It's hilarious in a way, take the tensor cores and ray tracing out of the equation and there's barely any difference between pascal and Turing. It's almost like that extra memory bandwidth is giving Turing its speed bump and nothing more.PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
NVIDIA is heavily marketing ray tracing as the killer feature for the RTX cards. Its clear that a generational gain in performance wasn't in the cards (pun intended) this time around.shabby - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
And with Ray tracing turned on these things will perform like cards from 4 years ago. Nvidias going back to the future.AshlayW - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
So in Far Cry 5, a game that I play a lot, I've essentially got RTX 2070 performance with my Vega 56 (OC+ Flashed to 64), but for £399 and the game free with it? Cool!The_Assimilator - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
But you also need a small nuclear reactor to power it and a moderately-sized dam to cool it, so there's that.Spunjji - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
If you run your computer for anything like sensible periods of time, that extra power draw still doesn't come close to amounting to the price difference. Remember, you have to consider it in context of the power draw of your entire home.pixelstuff - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
I think my price limit on GPUs is the "not much more than an entire gaming console with slightly better performance" bracket of $350-400. I guess we'll see if the 2060 fits that bill and makes a worthy upgrade to the 970. Otherwise I'll be waiting one extra generation this time around instead of upgrading every other generation.Icehawk - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
I’m with the crowd that says wtf to the new pricing - I’m a 670>970 owner and was hoping to upgrade to another x70 for $350-400 but they are priced too high for me now to justify. Hope they bring prices back to reality for the 2170 or that they offer GTX models along with RTX.If they want to shift the cards up a rank, IMO, they should have adjusted the naming schema.