The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
Again, the RTX 2070 slots into familiar position: faster than the GTX 1070 by 30 to 40%, yet only around 10% or so ahead of the GTX 1080. Even if it were to catch up to the GTX 1080 Ti, the RTX 2080 would need to make ground as well.
At 1080p, the cards quickly run into the CPU bottleneck, which is to be expected with top-tier video cards and the CPU intensive nature of RTS'es. Even still, the Founders Edition specs, which don't materially change the RTX 2070's positioning, is helpful for the RTX 2080 in pipping the GTX 1080 Ti.
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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).