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.
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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.