The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super & RTX 2060 Super Review: Smaller Numbers, Bigger Performance

Closing Thoughts

While this may technically be the conclusion of this specific review, in many ways the launch of NVIDIA’s new RTX 20 series Super cards is the start of something bigger. With video card launches set only days apart, NVIDIA has – if unexpectedly – fired the first salvo in the latest battle for the high-end of the video card market. In doing so, they’ve improved the value on their Turing cards by a moderate but much-needed margin, and in the process have set the pace for the cards to follow. So although today is NVIDIA’s day, in practice this launch part of a much larger picture that will become much clearer in a few days.

What then, does the launch of the RTX 20 series Super cards mean for the market? Looking solely within the NVIDIA product stack for the moment, it’s a welcome development for a line of cards that was big on die size but short on value. But this is mid-generation kicker that is just that: a refresh of existing hardware. The new Super parts are still based on the same TU104 and TU106 GPUs that have been on the market since the latter part of 2018, and as they are still the most cutting-edge GPUs out there in terms of features, they’re not at risk of getting outdated any time soon. The flip side of that coin is that since this is a refresh, NVIDIA isn’t bringing anything new to the table in terms of hardware features. This is, above all else, a modest realignment of NVIDIA’s product stack to ensure they remain competitive while spurring some new video card sales in slow market.

The good news then is that if you are in the market for buying a video card – particularly for new system builds – then this latest round in the GPU wars means that the amount of performance you get for the money is getting even better. The GeForce RTX 2060 Super is all but an RTX 2070 in name and in price, delivering virtually identical performance for $100 less than the original RTX 2070. And the GeForce RTX 2070 Super, while not quite a facsimile of the RTX 2080, delivers much of those gains, offering 96% of the RTX 2080’s performance for 71% of the price – or nearly some $200 cheaper than what that level of performance cost just last month. All told, both cards are about 15% faster than their direct, non-Super predecessors, which is not a massive performance gain, but is a welcome one.

For buyers looking to upgrade, however, things are a bit trickier. NVIDIA’s realignment improves their price-to-performance ratio; however, it doesn’t get around the fact that within NVIDIA’s lineup, none of the Turing architecture video cards deliver a full generational performance upgrade over their predecessors; the performance, partially a consequence of going with 12nm, just isn’t there. So these new Super cards don’t change the calculus involved in deciding whether to upgrade from Pascal – that it’s probably best to hold of until the next real generation of cards. However Maxwell (GTX 900 series) owners have a little more thinking to do, as this realignment means that GTX 980 and GTX 970 owners finally have similarly priced upgrades that are more than true generational updates in features and performance.

Past that, because the new Super cards are so similar to their predecessors, there’s little to say that we haven’t already touched on before. Despite tinkering with clockspeeds and SM counts, NVIDIA has held the line on energy efficiency, so the new Super cards slot in nicely within the Turing product family. Energy efficiency hasn’t gone up, but it also hasn’t gone down, and the Turing lineup remains the most energy efficient line of cards out there. Similarly, NVIDIA remains unchallenged in terms of hardware features, as they will remain the only vendor shipping hardware ray tracing and variable rate shading technology for 2019.

But with that said, we don’t have the complete picture of the high-end video card market; that will only come once AMD’s cards launch in a few days. Given that AMD’s cards actually go on sale first here – NVIDIA will follow 2 days later – there’s really no sense in making specific suggestions at this time. Rather we’ll see where the dust settles on July 7^th when AMD’s new Radeon cards launch. So in many respects, today’s NVIDIA launch is a prelude of a more important battle that takes place in a few days.

In the meantime, by launching their cards first, NVIDIA gets the first-mover advantage. They have shown their hand with better priced Turing cards, a modest improvement that none the less addresses NVIDIA’s one real weakness with the RTX 20 series. Now it’s going to be up to AMD to make the second move, and decide how they want to respond to NVIDIA. It risks becoming a bit of an exaggered stratagem at this point, but as the most important event to happen since the launch of the RTX 20 series almost a year ago, we’re about to see some of the most exciting times of the 2019 unfold in the video card market.