The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super & RTX 2060 Super Review: Smaller Numbers, Bigger Performance
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
The 2019 GPU Benchmark Suite & The Test
As we’re kicking off a new(ish) generation of video cards, we’re also kicking off a new generation of the AnandTech GPU benchmark suite.
For 2019 most of the suite has been refreshed to include games released in the last year. The latest iteration of the Tomb Raider franchise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is 2019’s anchor title and is the game used for power/temperature/noise testing as well as game performance testing. Also making its introduction to the GPU benchmark suite for the first time is an Assassin’s Creed game, thanks to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s extra-handy built-in benchmark.
For 2019 Ashes of the Singularity has been rotated out, so we’re empty on RTSes at the moment. But as an alternative we have Microsoft’s popular Forza Horizon 4, which marks the first time a Forza game has been included in the suite.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2019 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Action/TPS | Sept. 2018 | DX12 | |
| F1 2019 | Racing | Jun. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Assassin's Creed Odyssey | Action/Open World | Oct. 2018 | DX11 | |
| Metro Exodus | FPS | Feb. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Strange Brigade | TPS | Aug. 2018 | Vulkan | |
| Total War: Three Kingdoms | TBS | May. 2019 | DX11 | |
| The Division 2 | FPS | Mar. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open world | Apr. 2015 | DX11 | |
| Forza Horizon 4 | Racing | Oct. 2018 | DX12 | |
All told, I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of DirectX 12-enabled AAA games available this year. More than half of the benchmark suite is using DX12, with both AMD and NVIDIA cards showing performance gains across all of the games using this API. So this is a far cry from the early days of DX12, where using the low-level API would often send performance backwards. And speaking of low-level APIs, I’ve also thrown in Strange Brigade for this iteration, as it’s one of the only major Vulkan games to be released in the past year.
Finally, I’ve also kept Grand Theft Auto V as our legacy game for 2019. Despite being released for the PC over 4 years ago – and for game consoles 2 years before that – the game continues to be one of the top selling games on Steam. And even with its age, the scalability of the game means that it’s a heavy enough load to challenge even the latest video cards.
As for our hardware testbed, it too has been updated for the 2019 video card release cycle.
Internally we’ve made a pretty big change, going from an Intel HEDT platform (Core i7-7820X) to a standard desktop platform based around an overclocked Core i9-9900K and Z390 chipset. While we’ve used HEDT platforms for the GPU testbed for the last decade, HEDT is becoming increasingly irrelevant/compromised for gaming; while the extra PCIe lanes are nice, these platforms haven’t delivered the best CPU performance for games as of late.
By contrast, desktop processors with 8 cores now provide more than enough cores, and they also provide far better clockspeeds, delivering more of the single/lightly-threaded performance that games need. Furthermore, as SLI and Crossfire are on the rocks, the extra PCIe lanes aren’t as necessary as they once were.
On a side note, I had originally hoped to cycle in a Ryzen 3000 platform at this point, particularly for PCIe 4.0. However the timing of all of these hardware launches meant that we needed to go with an established platform, as it takes a week or so to build and validate a new GPU testbed. Plus with Ryzen 3000 not launching for another week, we wouldn’t have been able to use it for this review anyhow.
Otherwise the rest of our 2019 GPU testbed is relatively straightforward. With 32GB of RAM and a high-end Phison E12-based NVMe SSD, the system and any video cards being tested as well-fed. Enclosing all of this for our real-world style testing is our trusty NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Z390 Taichi |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Founders Edition AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 431.15 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.6.3 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1903) |
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Kevin G - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I'd be foolish to jump on any of these cards right now until after the RX 5700 reviews hit. But saying that, the RTX 2060 Super does look to be one very attractive card now. The rest of the line up feels like this is where nVidia should have originally positioned the RTX line up nearly a year ago as it would have given Pascal owners more of a reason to upgrade.This does make me wonder how much longer until nVidia will have their 7 nm chips ready. If they were due at the end of the year, why not just do a small price cut if the Radeon RX line up is competitive and wait it out? If nVidia's 7 nm chips are further out, this refresh makes far more sense but has me scratching my head as to what nVidia's hold up could be. If those 7 nm chips arrive in 2020, then AMD will have had 7 nm products out on the market (though for data centers) for a full year ahead of nVidia which again seems to be weird.
sing_electric - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
To be fair, you can't get the Nvidia Super cards until 7/9, after AMD's cards are out.When Nvidia launched the RTX series, I thought that they had to be pretty confident in their design to be doing it on 12nm. They probably got great yields from day 1, and I'm really surprised that they weren't able to meet demand from the time they launched.
Peter2k - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Probably the sheer size of the chips itself, thx to the RTX partsWould've been interesting to see a GTX 2080
Yojimbo - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
The 12FFN process is mature and the yields are good, but the RTX cards have large die sizes because of the features they have. I think prices do tend to go down even 2 or 3 years after a node comes out. Also, I'm willing to bet that GDDR6 prices are lower now than 9 months ago.I'm pretty sure NVIDIA won't be shipping any 7 nm parts in an significant volume until the second half of 2020. At that time NVIDIA needs to deliver its next generation data center GPU for the Perlmutter supercomputer. I guess they will also launch gaming GPUs because September or October of 2020 would be around the right time for it.
As far as NVIDIA's hold up, perhaps it's the current cost of the 7 nm node. AMD has no choice but to go to 7 nm. They need the power efficiency that the new node offers and they are probably willing to pay more per transistor to get it. NVIDIA doesn't need the power efficiency at the moment, so they are more willing to keep their costs down.
V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Nvidia just taped out their first 7nm design, so we can expect it in about a year. :)It’ll be interesting to see how much they’ll be able to get out of the double whammy of new architecture and new node.
And AFAIK they’ll use a denser 7nm node than AMD.
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
I quite agree, Yojimbo. 7nm or any other process step is a means to an ends, not an end in itself. Nvidia just don't need it; AMD do.Gastec - Wednesday, July 17, 2019 - link
GDDR6 prices would be lower unless there's a "power outage" every year in July.V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
They just taped out their first 7nm design, so it’s about a year away. :)Korguz - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
oh ??? says who ??V900 - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Reliable source. Can’t remember his name rn, but one of those industry insider honchos on Twitter.Read it over on Beyond3D forum.