The Test

Because NVIDIA is not productizing any other reference-quality GeForce RTX 2070 card besides the Founders Editions, which have non-reference specifications, we've gone ahead and emulated the true reference specifications with a 90MHz downclock and lowering the TDP by roughly 10W. This is to keep comparisons standardized and apples-to-apples, as we always look at reference-to-reference results.

CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g)
Power Supply: EVGA 1000 G3
Hard Disk: OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB)
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38)
Case: NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition
Monitor: LG 27UD68P-B
Video Cards: AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (Air Cooled)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
Video Drivers: NVIDIA Release 416.33 Press
AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.9.1
OS: Windows 10 Pro (April 2018 Update)
Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations Yes, both
Meet The GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Battlefield 1
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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.

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