MSI RTX 2070 Armor Review

Introduction and Technical Specifications

| Source: MSI Price: £459.99 Author: Tom Logan

Introduction

There is no doubt that the RTX 2080Ti had a serious amount of performance and new features built into the architecture that really stepped nVidia's game up. Often a new GPU comes with a few tweaks but largely more cores/shaders so that it's faster and better than the one that came before.

With their Turing architecture the RTX cards have taking a massive leap forwards. Not only does it have the "bigger, better, faster, more" ethos of the old way of doing things, but additionally a suite of extra elements really transform the possibilities and take us on to sunlit uplands. With dedicated Ray Tracing hardware - the RT part of the name unsurprisingly - you are guaranteed more life like lighting and reflections and shadows and all the good stuff that makes images feel like a photo of the real world, rather than an artistic impression of it. Additionally the Tensor cores can bring all the benefits of super sampling without any of the performance hit. Indeed as we've seen in our Final Fantasy XV testing previously, so powerful are the Tensor cores that you end up getting higher frames per second with Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) than you get with no AA at all. All of the benefits of smooth images, none of the performance problems.

Obviously the RTX 2070 is cut-down when compared to the flagship RTX models, but we're here to discover how much performance has been lost and how it fares against the current models.

Technical Specifications

Whenever a new graphics card comes out that fits into the range a little below the flagship models, everyone wants to know what has changed and how close it gets to the big ones.

The main change, unsurprisingly, is to do with the GPU upon which the card is based. The RTX 2080Ti used the TU102-300A version of the Turing GPU, with 4352 Cores and 356-bit GDDR6. The RTX 2080 utilises the TU104-400A GPU with 2944 Cores and 256-bit GDDR6. Today's review card, the RTX 2070, is built using the TU106-400 GPU with 2304 Cores and 256-bit GDDR6.

The RTX 2080Ti definitely changed the game when it comes to smooth frame rates in HDR 4K, being the first card capable of over 60FPS in nearly every title. Naturally the reduced core count of the 2080 meant it wasn't quite as impressive at the higher resolutions. However, the RTX 2070 isn't aimed at those of you who expect 60 FPS in 4K titles, but instead is more aimed at those who want the benefits of the Tensing Cores and RT feature set at more modest resolutions. When compared to the GTX 1070 that preceded it, the RTX 2070 has bumped the floating point shader performance up from 6.5 TFLOPS to 7.9 TFLOPS. Hopefully this translates to better gaming performance. So let's take a shuftie at how the MSI RTX 2070 Armor does.







Preview Video





1 - Introduction and Technical Specifications 2 - Up Close 3 - Test Setup and Overclocking 4 - 3D Mark 5 - 3D Mark 4K 6 - Deus Ex 7 - F1 2018 8 - Far Cry 5 9 - Final Fantasy XV 10 - Forza Horizon 4 11 - Ghost Recon : Wildlands 12 - Hitman 13 - Monster Hunter World 14 - Rise of the Tomb Raider 15 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider 16 - Middle Earth : Shadow of War 17 - Time Spy Extreme 18 - Total War : Warhammer 19 - Total War : Warhammer II 20 - Unigine Valley 21 - Unigine Valley 4K 22 - Unigine Superposition 23 - Temperatures and Power Draw 24 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Next»

Most Recent Comments