Intro

The RTX 2060 SUPER & RTX 2070 SUPER arrive to take on the Red Devil RX Vega 56 & the liquid-cooled RX Vega 64 in a 40 game Mega-review

The GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and the RTX 2070 SUPER are the sixth and seventh GPUs based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, and they will launch for sale on July 9 at $399 and $499 respectively. A RTX 2080 SUPER has also been announced for July 23 availability at $699 and we hope to review it. Each of these ‘super’ cards are an upgraded refresh of the current original RTX cards bringing more performance for ray traced games.

The original RTX 2060 will remain at $349 as the entry-level RTX card, but the original RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080 will become subject to market pricing as they are phased out in favor of the more powerful Super varieties. And for a limited time, starting on July 9, qualifying purchases of a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, or GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER- based graphics card will include digital key codes for two upcoming games that support real-time ray tracing, Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

<SCRIPT language='JavaScript1.1' SRC="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/adj/N30602.3753112BABELTECHREVIEWS/B24670551.281357544;abr=!ie;sz=728x90;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=?"> </SCRIPT>

NVIDIA has decided to go with a ‘Super’ naming scheme instead of their more usual ‘Ti’ designation for an upgraded card. We may speculate that if NVIDIA had picked ‘Ti’ instead, they would not have been as readily able to phase out and replace their original RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 with the Super cards.

We are going to test the new Super cards’ performance versus the original cards, against the RTX 2080, and versus the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56. Before we use our benchmark suite of 40 PC games at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, let’s first lets see what NVIDIA has upgraded.

The RTX 2060 SUPER

The GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER is based on the TU106 GPU and it boasts an increased core count, expanded memory bus, and 8GB of memory making for a solid upgrade over the original RTX 2060.

NVIDIA says that the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER is just 1% slower on average overall than the original stock GeForce RTX 2070 at 1440p and we will test this claim.

The Founders Edition cards are very similar in size and in every other outside physical characteristics including their backplate, cooling, and an 8-pin PCIe cable, with the primary difference being the SUPER logo. The RTX 2060 is priced at $349 and the SUPER will be $399 and both cards will coexist in NVIDIA’s lineup.

The RTX 2070 SUPER

The GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER is a derivative of NVIDIA’s TU104 GPU.

According to NVIDIA, the RTX 2070 SUPER is faster than the Pascal GTX 1080 Ti, and it’s also on average 16% faster overall than the original GeForce RTX 2070 at 2560×1440 resolution.

The RTX 2070 SUPER is a physically larger card than the original RTX 2070 FE.

Although the original RTX 2070 FE uses a single 8-pin PCIe cable, the SUPER requires 6-pin+8-pin cables.

The connections are identical for both RTX 2060s, but the RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition has replaced the original DVI port with a DisplayPort.

Performance

We have had less than a week to evaluate the SUPER RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 SUPER so we have narrowly focused on their performance increases over the original cards. We also want to see how close the RTX 2060 SUPER at $399 performs compared with the original RTX 2070 which launched at $499.

Similarly, we want to see how much faster the RTX 2070 SUPER is than the original, and we want to see if it narrows the gap with the RTX 2080 FE which will be eventually also be replaced by a RTX 2080 SUPER. We have already tested Pascal versus Turing many times, and we know that the RTX 2080 is faster than the GTX 1080 Ti, and the RTX 2070 is faster than the GTX 1080.

Since NVIDIA has launched the SUPER cards before AMD’s RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, we will compare instead with the Red Devil RX Vega 56 and versus the liquid-cooled RX Vega 64. We benchmark an expanded 40-game suite including Anno 1800 using a total of nine video cards for BTR’s Big Picture.

Before we explore performance testing, let’s take a closer look at our test configuration.