The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM ESTWolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
Wolfenstein II gives us a more intriguing look at the underlying capabilities of the RTX 2070. In general, the RTX 20 series and RX Vega perform very well in this game, leaving the GTX 1080 Ti in an uncharacteristic position. The older cards, however, suffer extra for their lack of VRAM. Where the GTX 980 Ti's 6GB is already wearing a little thin, the GTX 980's 4GB is simply not enough and the game makes sure to remind you. The measured 30+fps numbers is an amusing disguise for the everpresent stuttering. In that sense, the RTX 2070 has a distinct advantage by virtue of its full 8GB complement of framebuffer.
It's not clear how much is due to Wolfenstein II's Vulkan implementation, and it will be very interesting to see how the upcoming Doom Eternal fares on GPUs. It's hardly the case that these high framerates would be wasted, even at 1080p; 240Hz monitors and the like are very much on the market.
In any case, the RTX 2070's 1440p Wolfenstein II performance is another ideal scenario, where previous generation Pascal and Maxwell are simply outclassed and thus wouldn't be threatening 2070 sales in the least.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
121 Comments
View All Comments
FreckledTrout - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
That pretty much sums it up.Doesn't this entire generation seem like it should have been made on 7nm to keep die sizes and costs down along with the heat?
Wwhat - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
in games*You forgot to add.
Personally I'm curious about what non-gaming software will use those tensor and RT cores and what that will bring. I mean if for example Blender traced 3 times faster it would be quite a thing for Blender users. Same for video editing software users I imagine.
And then there's the use for students and scientist.
And the whole wave of AI stuff that people are now getting into.
It's funny because I would have thought that Anadtech would the site that was the one with not exclusively gamers and people using graphics cards exclusively for gaming, but going through the comments you'd think this was a gamer-oriented site - and a gamers site only.
althaz - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
So that's a solid "no" then? You can get better performance for significantly less. This card isn't targeted at me (a 1080 owner), but until the ray tracing stuff starts to be worth anything, this card seems just too overpriced for a reasonable person to consider.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
Spelling and grammar corrections.I did not read through the whole thing, but this is what I did find.
"The card is already coming in with a price premium so it's important to firmly faster."
Missing "be".
"The card is already coming in with a price premium so it's important to be firmly faster."
"For the RTX 2070, 4K and 1440p performance once agani settles near the GTX 1080." Right letters, wrong ordering
"For the RTX 2070, 4K and 1440p performance once again settles near the GTX 1080."
Also, I am of the opinion that you should focus your reviews on the performance of the cards vs. price/speed positioning/slot. For example, you could note that the 20 series tends to have better 99th percentile frame rates. This was a big win for the Vega when it first came out. I have not actually crunched the numbers to see if the Vega is better or worse than the 20 series. The calculation would be (minimum*100)/average == % a lower value being a larger discrepancy (worse).
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Certainly makes me feel better about pulling the trigger on a $525 overclocked 1080 with a free game last weekend. 2070s are certainly less abundant, and definitely not for $525. The premium only buys 5-10% performance at base clocks, not worth another $100lenghui - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Dear AT, please stop auto-playing your "Buy the Right CPU" video. Pleeeeeeeeeeeze. It's driving me away from your site. I am on my last thread.DominionSeraph - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Unfortunately the design makes it look like a terrible XFX AMD card.rtho782 - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
2070 incurs less of a perf hit in HDR? Ryan seems to think it has no impact: https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/80115626506...Luke212 - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
Nvidia gimped the tensor cores on consumer RTX, that’s why tensor core benchmarks are half a titan V or Quadro RTX. It can’t do FP32 accumulate full speed.dcole001 - Friday, October 26, 2018 - link
I currently have GTX 1070 and just can't justify upgrading due to the fact that Ray Tracing is currently not being used in any games right now. yes there is 15 - 25 FPS performance boost running 1440P still not worth $499 - $599 cost. Wait a year and this Video Card will drop and there actually might be some games taking advantage of Ray Tracing.