The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
As we wrap up, it’s clear that judging the RTX 2070 involves the same themes that surfaced in the RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 review. First is for the forward-looking featuresets that have yet to publicly launch. Another, and closely intertwined, is the premium pricing that is based on those features, as opposed to being based on conventional gaming performance. And lastly is the existing competition in the form of Pascal, especially where the RTX cards fall in the same performance tier.
For the RTX 2070 Founders Edition, those themes are more relevant and harder to dismiss. By its nature, the card is an entry-level model for consumers interested in real time raytracing and other RTX platform features, as well as the traditional high-end card for prospective enthusiasts and upgraders on a budget. In the past couple generations, these ‘enthusiast value’ parts have essentially provided last-gen flagship performance (or better), at non-flagship prices. For example:
- GTX 1070 for GTX 980 Ti
- GTX 970 for GTX 780 Ti
- GTX 770 refresh of GTX 680
- RX 580/480 for R9 390
- R9 390 refresh of R9 290
- R9 280X refresh of HD 7970
Going back to the numbers, the RTX 2070 Founders Edition TDP and boost clock tweaks only amount to around a 4% gain over the reference 2070 at 4K. The difference is not much in the grand scheme of things, but the setup makes more sense when looking at the GTX 1080 competition. The reference RTX 2070 is faster than the GTX 1080 at 4K and 1440p by only around 10%, a gap that is easily closed by factory-overclocked custom cards.
By hardware resources, the RTX 2070 was expected to be around 75% of the 2080. But Founders-to-Founders and reference-to-reference, the RTX 2070 is bringing around 83% of the RTX 2080’s 1440p performance (and 82% of 4K performance). So the performance gap is comparable to previous generations, where the GTX 1070 brought 81% of the performance of the GTX 1080, and the GTX 970 brought 87% of the GTX 980. Except here the RTX 2080 is only managing GTX 1080 Ti level performance for traditional gaming.
Looking back at the Pascal launch, the GTX 1070 brought a 57% 1440p performance gain over GTX 970, which was substantive but with its $450 Founders Edition pricing, not necessarily a must-buy for GTX 970 owners. On the other hand, GTX 770/670 owners had a lot to gain from that upgrade.
Here with Turing, the RTX 2070 is ahead of the GTX 1070 reference-to-reference around 35% and 36% at 1440p and 4K, respectively. In its Founders Edition guise, the difference is around 41% for both resolutions. Either way, the performance lies somewhere between the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti, except with a $600 Founders Edition price. In that sense, it offers less than last generation but at a higher price, the premium being tied to real time raytracing and other hardware-accelerated features. And when those features finally release, there's no clear sense of the quality or resolution compromises necessary to run those features.
For current GTX 10 series owners, the RTX 2070 is largely a side-grade, offering known performance for possibily worse power efficiency. For those with low-end cards, or 900 series and older products, the $500/$600 budget pulls in a number of other alternatives: the GTX 1080, RX Vega 64, or even the GTX 1070 Ti. As far as standard $500 MSRP pricing goes, for which some cards are priced so currently, it helps the RTX 2070 stay in the price/performance race, where at $600 that might be a $100+ premium over a competing product. In particular, the sub $500 GTX 1080 cards are a major spoiler for the RTX 2070, offering equivalent performance at lower price. A prospective RTX 2070 buyer will have to be honest with themselves on utilizing RTX features when the time comes, and any intentions they might have on upgrading monitors for HDR, higher resolution and/or refresh rate, and variable refresh rate technology.
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webdoctors - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
You should shop around. I bought a new EVGA 1070TI from Amazon last weekend for ~$270.The regular 1070 is also that price now on Amazon website.
The 1070TI definitely seems the sweet spot for upgrading right now...
philehidiot - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Have to agree here. I'd like to see the 1070Ti for completeness but Anandtech may not have the card to hand (you simply can't always keep stock of / put your hands on every card you want), might be planning on adding it later or just thought it'd be easy enough to extrapolate where it will fall. As for value for money, I did a massive table (in pen for some reason) which calculated aggregate benchmarks for a load of cards (1080Ti, 1080, 1070Ti, 1070, Vega 64) that I was interested in and then calculated a performance per Pound (UK here) for each one. Aside from the 1080Ti (which was far better value in terms of performance per Pound), the rest had practically identical value rankings aside from the AMD card which was slightly lower. I actually ended up buying a Vega 64 as the price briefly dropped by £110 just before Turing was released which made it an absolute bargain and, seeing the performance here, I'm relatively delighted that for once the GPU market has not screwed me over. I'm guessing the prices dropped as people were expecting Turing to be amazing and now they're back up as it's just pretty meh all over and very overpriced. My old card went for £100 (I don't normally sell them, but give them away to a friend) and so my cost to upgrade was ~£300 which I'm very happy with given that I would never EVER consider spending 2080 / 2080Ti money on a GPU. The worst part for Nvidia is that I am their target market - I'm a gamer who spends a lot of money on his PC to play the latest games at decent quality settings and I'm also a professional who isn't exactly poorly off. Could I afford a 2080Ti? Easily. Would I EVER buy one? No. The price is insulting and so is the marketing. I'd have never have considered AMD before they released all that insulting marketing rubbish. They gave AMD a sale.Spunjji - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
I know at least one other person with the exact same story. It's irritating for folks like us, but as long as the market continues to swallow it they won't miss our sales!hansmuff - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
A 1070 Ti is way too close to the 2070 in perf, why bother at this point when you don't know if the new features bring anything to the table with the 2070?A lot of people have 1070's, non-Ti, and have more reason to wonder if this a significant enough upgrade. I think Anandtech did the right thing here.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Nah. 1070Ti is as low as ~$400. 1080 is as low as ~$440.http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-10...
Game performance differentials range from 6% to as much as 22%, but i'd say for 10% more on the price, you get a tiny bit more than 10% of the performance uptick. Hence, 1080 is a better overall value in terms of price/performance to 1070 Ti.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Not according to Techpowerup and German prices. The cheapest 1070ti is 430€, the cheapest 1080 is 480€. The relative performance towards a 2080Ti is 62%/55%/50% for the 1070Ti in 1080p/1440p/2160p and 66%/58%/52% for the 1080 in the same resolutions. That means the 1080 delivers only 95%/94%/93% of the performance/€ compared to the 1070Ti. Things are so close though as to warrant a real inspection when seeing a deal for one card or another.Vayra - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
While true, once overclocked, the 1080 can stretch its legs a bit more due to the faster GDDR5X, making the lead a bit larger, and its additional shaders also benefit a bit more from a 'similar' clock to a 1070ti. They're almost a perfect match if you consider perf/dollar, and in that case the 1080 is and was always the better choice, because higher absolute performance should usually result in a worse perf/dollar number.Marlin1975 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
I'll take a $329 RTX2080. Comparison chart is off.Performance is not bad, but the price is. Until the price comes down the 1080 seems like a much better buy, esp with rebates on some now.
Koenig168 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Paying for RTX which we cannot use ATM and not sure we want, bearing in mind the performance hit.Antoine. - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Why do you compare in your final words the RTX2070 to the GTX1070? Just because they have the same marketing endname does not mean it's in the best interest of your readers to compare these two.The only relevant guide here is the pricing of course! RTX2070 have the same pricetag as GTX1080TI. Comparing it to GTX1070TI is a stretch but why not. But the 1070?! a 400-dollar card?