The third GeForce RTX from NVIDIA is the RTX 2070, and in some ways, it could be the most interesting Turing GeForce so far. How could that be? Well, it’s the most affordable, for starters, priced at $499. That becomes the least-expensive way for people to join the RTX world, which of course includes special RTX features not found on other cards – including last-gen Pascal.

It’s hard to call the RTX 2070 a “replacement” for another, because there are multiple angles to look at it. From a raw performance standpoint, the RTX 2070 should come behind the GTX 1080 most often, but the opposite is true in testing. Ultimately, the RTX 2070 falls behind the GTX 1080 Ti, but in some cases, it’s not that far behind.

This review is going to be a lot quicker than I’d like, so if you have any questions that I haven’t tackled, please holler in the comments. As I’ve been focusing rather ardently on workstation stuff lately, the gaming stuff hasn’t gotten as much attention as I’d like to give it. Fortunately, workloads are clearing out, and once RTX-capable Windows comes out, it’ll be a good time to retest the whole kit and kaboodle.

As just mentioned, the RTX 2070 technically falls behind the GTX 1080 from a raw performance standpoint, but Turing brings some optimizations that help propel the card ahead quite often.

Here’s the current and last-gen lineup from NVIDIA:

NVIDIA’s GeForce Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price RTX 2080 Ti 4352 1350 13.4 TFLOPS 11GB 1 616 GB/s 250W $999 RTX 2080 2944 1515 10.0 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 215W $699 RTX 2070 2304 1410 7.4 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 175W $499 TITAN Xp 3840 1480 12.1 TFLOPS 12GB 2 548 GB/s 250W $1,199 GTX 1080 Ti 3584 1480 11.3 TFLOPS 11GB 2 484 GB/s 250W $699 GTX 1080 2560 1607 8.8 TFLOPS 8GB 2 320 GB/s 180W $499 GTX 1070 Ti 2432 1607 8.1 TFLOPS 8GB 3 256 GB/s 180W $449 GTX 1070 1920 1506 6.4 TFLOPS 8GB 3 256 GB/s 150W $379 GTX 1060 1280 1700 4.3 TFLOPS 6GB 3 192 GB/s 120W $299 GTX 1050 Ti 768 1392 2.1 TFLOPS 4GB 3 112 GB/s 75W $139 GTX 1050 640 1455 1.8 TFLOPS 2GB 3 112 GB/s 75W $109 Notes

Nowadays, it feels like specs only tell half the story, which is actually pretty important when it comes to Turing. In some workloads, namely DirectX 12 (but including others), Turing can push GeForce quite a bit ahead over last-gen, leading a card like the 2070 to almost catch up to a 1080 Ti. Unfortunately, those are rare cases, and most seen in synthetic tests, but it gives us hope for better game optimization for the architecture in time.

ASUS’ Republic of Gamers STRIX version RTX 2070 sports a factory overclock, triple fans, customizable RGB, and a cooler that takes up just a bit more than 2 slots. It’s a good thing 2070 doesn’t support SLI… right?

Because this is a pre-overclocked card, please be aware that scores will be slightly higher than the reference design.

A Look At Test Methodology

Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality

A total of eight games are included in our current test suite. Some have appeared here before, while others make their first appearance: Monster World Hunter, Fortnite, and F1 2018. I had planned to include PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as a ninth title, but the results were too sporadic to inspire any sort of confidence (an issue not seen in Fortnite, by comparison).

Here’s the full list of tested games and developer allegiances, as well as synthetic tests also used:

Battlefield 1

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – AMD partner

– F1 2018

Far Cry 5 – AMD partner

– Fortnite

Monster Hunter World

Rise of the Tomb Raider – NVIDIA partner

– Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands – NVIDIA partner

– UL 3DMark & VRMark

Unigine Superposition

For our apples-to-apples testing, the graphics settings seen above apply to every one of our tested resolutions so as to deliver standard apples-to-apples results. In most cases, each configuration is tested twice, with more runs added if the initial results make the extra testing necessary. Fortnite is the only game tested three times by default due to its variable nature.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider will replace Rise of the Tomb Raider in our suite as soon as its RTX enhancements come along. Similarly, those same RTX enhancements can’t be taken advantage of until Microsoft releases its DXR API to the wild, something expected to happen with the Redstone 5 fall update. For now, we’re largely stuck to traditional testing. Speaking of, let’s get on with it.