If you ever feel like the graphics card market is stale, just wait a little bit longer. It seems that without fail, we’re hit with a deluge of releases all at once – a reality exasperated right now by the fact that AMD not only has its own new GPUs releasing soon, but new CPUs, as well.

Ahead of AMD’s launch, NVIDIA wanted to remind the world that it has an answer to every conceivable AMD desktop GPU, even before a new threat has the chance to arrive. This latest response to pending competition comes to us in the form of SUPER, impacting three models: RTX 2060, 2070, and soon, 2080.

The three SUPER models all feature slightly increased core counts over their respective originals, while the 2060 SUPER gains an additional boost by way of an increased framebuffer size. Considering that we’re talking about a $400 GPU here, it’s nice to see an 8GB 2060 finally available.

Presumably because of that framebuffer augmentation, the RTX 2060 SUPER is being treated as a separate model in the lineup, demanding a $50 premium over the non-SUPER, which puts it at $399. The original 2070 and 2080 models, however, are going to completely replace the previous iterations, and retain their price tags ($499 for 2070, and $699 for 2080).

Here’s a specs table to help you get a better impression of NVIDIA’s current and last-gen offerings:

NVIDIA’s GeForce Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP SRP TITAN RTX 4608 1770 16.3 TFLOPS 24GB 1 672 GB/s 280W $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti 4352 1350 13.4 TFLOPS 11GB 1 616 GB/s 250W $999 RTX 2080 SUPER 3072 1650 11.1 TFLOPS 8GB 1 496 GB/s 250W $699 RTX 2080 2944 1515 10.0 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 215W $699 RTX 2070 SUPER 2560 1605 9.1 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 215W $499 RTX 2070 2304 1410 7.4 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 175W $499 RTX 2060 SUPER 2176 1470 7.2 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 175W $399 RTX 2060 1920 1680 6.4 TFLOPS 6GB 1 336 GB/s 160W $349 GTX 1660 Ti 1536 1500 5.5 TFLOPS 6GB 1 288 GB/s 120W $279 GTX 1660 1408 1530 5 TFLOPS 6GB 1 192 GB/s 120W $279 GTX 1650 896 1485 3 TFLOPS 4GB 1 128 GB/s 75W $279 TITAN Xp 3840 1405 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 1733 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

This table doesn’t take Tensor and RT cores into consideration, which NVIDIA exclusively offers on its RTX cards. With Tensor cores, gamers can take advantage of deep-learning super-sampling anti-aliasing (DLSS) in supported games, effectively enhancing the level of detail in a scene (but to hit-or-miss effect right now).

So far, it seems like many more game developers are more jazzed over real-time ray tracing. That’s especially the case when you look back at E3, which saw a handful of great games vow their support. That includes Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Control, and Watch Dogs: Legion. We ultimately hoped to tackle RTX performance for this review, but some software fought with us too much (more in the methodology section), so it will come later.

For creators, RTX’s RT cores will deliver real-time ray tracing to give immediate feedback on scene updates. This kind of interactive rendering used to be abysmally slow, but real-time ray tracing can speed it up to the point of acceptable performance. More software is coming out with this support all of the time, and we’d expect that by the winter, all of the major consumer rendering solutions will include RTX support in some way.

All three of the new SUPER cards give a boost to performance on all RTX fronts, including “rays cast” and TFLOPS performance for deep-learning. So, even without the general GPU core boost, these cards will enable even greater ray tracing performance. That may still only mean a few FPS at each tick, given how computationally demanding it is, but that added performance is even more critical at the sub-60 FPS range.

We’ll take a look at creator and ray tracing gaming performance in the weeks ahead. For now, let’s quickly explore our gaming test system and suite, and then get right into a look at the performance.

A Look At Test Methodology

All GPUs have been tested with up-to-date drivers, and for the first time for our gaming suite, in the updated Windows 10 May Update. Our OS install is kept as clean and optimized as possible to reduce possible benchmark interference, ensuring accurate results. V-Sync, G-SYNC and FreeSync are disabled at the monitor and driver level.

Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality

A total of ten games are included in our current test suite. Recent additions include Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for some super-high FPS eSports testing, as well as the new F1 2019, Metro Exodus, The Division 2, and Total War: Three Kingdoms. Meanwhile, Battlefield V, Far Cry 5, Monster Hunter: World, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the usual assortment of synthetics make a return in our updated suite.



Battlefield V Counter-Strike: Global Offensive F1 2019 Far Cry 5 Metro Exodus Monster Hunter: World Shadow of the Tomb Raider Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege Tom Clancy's The Division 2 Total War: Three Kingdoms UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition

On the topic of suite overhauls, this is the first one where we’ve done testing to generate percentile results. Only a couple of games are measured this way right now, but we plan to expand such testing with future benchmark runs.

Here’s the full list of tested synthetic benchmarks, games, and developer allegiances:

Battlefield V

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

F1 2019

Far Cry 5 – AMD partner

– Metro Exodus – NVIDIA partner

– Monster Hunter World

Shadow of the Tomb Raider – NVIDIA partner

– Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege – NVIDIA partner

– Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – AMD partner

– Total War: Three Kingdoms

UL 3DMark & VRMark

Unigine Superposition

This collection of games gives us a nice blend of DirectX 11 and 12 APIs, but it unfortunately lacks both Vulkan and ray tracing testing. We tried to include Rage 2 for a Vulkan performance angle, until a patch stopped the game from working on our NVIDIA install (even after an OS reinstall). We then moved on with World War Z, which doesn’t let you screenshot its results screen, and can randomly boot up as DX11 instead of Vulkan. We often don’t know when to accept defeat, but with so much testing going on right now, we had to just scrap Vulkan for now.



Battlefield V - Tested Settings (1) Battlefield V - Tested Settings (2) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Tested Settings (1) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Tested Settings (2) F1 2019 - Tested Settings (1) F1 2019 - Tested Settings (2) Far Cry 5 - Tested Settings (1) Far Cry 5 - Tested Settings (2) Far Cry 5 - Tested Settings (3) Metro Exodus Monster Hunter: World - Tested Settings (1) Monster Hunter: World - Tested Settings (2) Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Tested Settings (1) Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Tested Settings (2) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Tested Settings (1) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Tested Settings (2) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Tested Settings (3) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (1) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (2) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (3) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (4) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (5) Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Tested Settings (6) Total War: Three Kingdoms - Tested Settings (1) Total War: Three Kingdoms - Tested Settings (2)

Note: You can download all of the tested setting images at once here (ZIP, 7MB).

On the ray tracing side, we planned to use Battlefield V until activation DRM stepped in. We then tried to use Metro Exodus‘ external benchmark tool, but it would crash before the content could open, which is the same issue we had at its launch. Suffice to say, this article lacks certain results we wanted to get in, but there are many more to help make up for it. And with that, let’s get right to it, starting with Drmfield V.