The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM EST
When NVIDIA first announced their Turing based GeForce RTX 20 series, they unveiled three GeForce RTX models: the 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070. As we’ve seen earlier, Turing and the GeForce RTX 20 series as a whole are designed on a hardware and software level to enable realtime raytracing for games, as well as other new specialized features, though all of these are yet to launch in games. Nevertheless, last month’s release of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 finally revealed their places on the traditional performance spectrum. As the ‘value’ oriented enthusiast offering, the RTX 2070 is arguably the more important card for most prospective buyers. And so, ahead of tomorrow’s launch, today we take a look at the GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition.
Even as the value option, which is historically the case for the x70 part, the RTX 2070 Founders Edition comes in at $599, with standard MSRP at $499. For all intents and purposes, the lower $499 price won’t be seen in the near-future as AIBs will be aligned with NVIDIA to avoid cannibalization and lower ASPs. Either way, the $500 mark makes it clear that ‘value’ and ‘cheap’ don’t necessarily mean the same thing.
| NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison | ||||||
| RTX 2070 Founder's Edition |
RTX 2070 | GTX 1070 | RTX 2080 | |||
| CUDA Cores | 2304 | 2304 | 1920 | 2944 | ||
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | ||
| Core Clock | 1410MHz | 1410MHz | 1506MHz | 1515MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1710MHz | 1620MHz | 1683MHz | 1710MHz FE: 1800MHz |
||
| Memory Clock | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | ||
| VRAM | 8GB | 8GB | 8GB | 8GB | ||
| Single Precision Perf. | 7.9 TFLOPs | 7.5 TFLOPs | 6.5 TFLOPs | 10.1 TFLOPs | ||
| "RTX-OPS" | 45T | 45T | N/A | 60T | ||
| SLI Support | No | No | Yes | Yes | ||
| TDP | 185W | 175W | 150W | 215W FE: 225W |
||
| GPU | TU106 | TU106 | GP104 | TU104 | ||
| Transistor Count | 10.8B | 10.8B | 7.2B | 13.6B | ||
| Architecture | Turing | Turing | Pascal | Turing | ||
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 16nm | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | ||
| Launch Date | 10/17/2018 | N/A | 06/10/2016 | 09/20/2018 | ||
| Launch Price | $599 | $499 | MSRP: $379 Founders $449 |
MSRP: $699 Founders $799 |
||
For the RTX 2070, its value would be measured by both traditional rasterization performance, and hybrid rendering performance. For the former, the GeForce GTX 1080 sits at the $500 price point, so that is very much the card to beat, with the AMD Radeon Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1070 Ti also offering similar levels of performance. Beating the GTX 1080 by a significant margin will in turn offer more to those still on older generation cards like the GTX 970 & 980. But trading blows with the GTX 1080 would leave the RTX 2070 in a situation where it is priced higher with less availability for equivalent traditional performance. As an aside, HDR presents a wrinkle where the RTX 20 series incurs less of a performance hit, but the difference varies per game and only a selection of games support HDR in the first place.
Unfortunately, accurate hybrid rendering performance remains somewhat of a mystery. Games have yet to bring support for RTX platform features, and additionally DXR itself is only just starting to rollout as part of Windows 10 October 2018 Update (1809), itself delayed due to data-loss issues. RTX platform features like realtime ray tracing and DLSS come at a steep cost; currently, the RTX 2080 Ti stands at $1200 and the RTX 2080 at $800, and now with the $600 RTX 2070 as the entry card for those features. So for gamers interested in using realtime ray tracing, it's still unclear what we should expect as far as real-world hybrid rendering performance is concerned; in any case, the RTX 2070 does not support SLI, which precludes a future mGPU drop-in upgrade. That is to say, if the RTX 2070’s real time ray tracing performance target for resolution/framerate is significantly lower than the RTX 2080 Ti or 2080, there won’t be an easy solution in the form of doubling up 2070s.
In any case, the RTX 2070 is built on its own GPU, TU106, rather than being a cut-down version of TU104, and by the numbers offers 75% of the RTX 2080’s shading/texturing/tensor resources with the same ROP count and 256-bit memory bus. Considering the SM-heavy nature of ray tracing workloads, it would be interesting to investigate once real time ray tracing and DXR is fully released to the public in production-ready in games.
But as a straight upgrade, the RTX 2070 is in a delicate situation. What we know already is where the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 lie in terms of conventional gaming performance; the RTX 2080 Ti is roundabouts the Titan V, while the RTX 2080 is comparable to the Titan Xp and GTX 1080 Ti. As the top two performing cards of the stack, there’s some natural leeway with premiums, but the RTX 2070 does not have that luxury as the x70 part, and will be right in the mix of Pascal with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Ti in the $450 to $600 range, along with GTX 1080 Ti models at the $700 mark. The GTX 1080s priced at $490 could act as a significant spoiler if there are issues with launch inventory, which has already caused delays in the RTX 2080 Ti.
Beyond that, the biggest open questions are all about the RTX platform features like realtime ray tracing and DLSS. Gamers considering making the plunge will be looking at the RTX 2070 as the entry point, but right now there is no accurate and generalizable way to determine what that entry level performance would look like in the real world.
| Fall 2018 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
| AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
| $1199 | GeForce RTX 2080 Ti | ||||
| $799 | GeForce RTX 2080 | ||||
| $709 | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti | ||||
| $599 | GeForce RTX 2070 | ||||
| Radeon RX Vega 64 | $569 | ||||
| Radeon RX Vega 56 | $489 | GeForce GTX 1080 | |||
| $449 | GeForce GTX 1070 Ti | ||||
| $399 | GeForce GTX 1070 | ||||
| Radeon RX 580 (8GB) | $269/$279 | GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (1280 cores) |
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Vayra - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
In the same vein you could say 'why get so hung up on a name to defend its a same tier card'Price matters because if perf/dollar doesn't improve there is no reason for any *buyer* to see it as a direct replacement.
Midwayman - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Why would you say that the 1080 is the card to beat and then use a garbage FE version as the benchmark comparison. Every 1080 card you're going to buy today is substantially faster than that FE version.Dr. Swag - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Because that's what they have... Plus they downclocked the founders 2070 to reference speeds too so it's not like it's that big of a deal.Midwayman - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
They have tested numerous non-FE 1080 cards. The issue is that its a comparison nobody will be making when buying a 1080. It makes the 2070 look way better in the graphs than it should. If they feel the need to include a FE model for reference, fine. But they should have included a version with the faster ram and a typical factory OC since that is what is most often for sale right now. Particularly in light of the price point of the 2070.Yojimbo - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
How does it make it look much better than it should when they downclocked the founder's edition to a clock below what the 3rd party 2070 cards which are comparable to the 1080s you want to use will be using.And I don't think you can use the price point of the 2070 FE or the base 2070 as a justification to include factory overclocked cards from 3rd party board partners. There are other reasons for the price differential besides price/performance in current games. And since there is a price premium for NVIDIA FE cards you're going to end up with a price comparison problem anyway.
They tested numerous non-FE 1080 cards and when they are available I'm sure they will test numerous non-FE 2070 cards. When that happens I am sure they will make the comparisons among those two sets of cards, since there will no longer be the FE/non-FE problem.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
It's a difficult situation because there seems to be a dollar value to the founder's edition beyond the performance, and the reviewed card is a founder's edition.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Our editorial policy long has been (and remains) that we'll always compare products stock to stock. That means comparing a reference clocked 1070 to a reference clocked 2070, etc. This is so that we never overstate the performance of a product; as we use the reference specs, anything you buy will be as fast as our card, if not faster. As we can only loo at a finite number of cards, it continues to be the fairest and most consistent way to test cards.Plus we got a earful (rightfully) whenever we've deviated from this. You guys have made it very clear that you don't like seeing factory overclocked cards treated as any kind of baseline in a launch article.
Exodite - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Thank you Ryan!I, for one, appreciate this approach and I'm very glad to see Anandtech sticking to it.
Eletriarnation - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Pretty sure there's a mistake in the chart on the front page that puts the transistor count of the 2070 as >2x the 2080.cwolf78 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
My first PC was a Tandy 1000 RL with an Intel 8086 CPU. The first PC I ever built was a 486SX/25 and I've been a PC gamer ever since. For the first time since, well, ever, I'm seriously considering just forgoing PC gaming in the short-term. Between the ridiculous pricing of GPU's and RAM, I just don't see how this can be a hobby for the vast majority of people anymore. It's nice that you can get a lot of bang for your CPU buck these days, that doesn't even begin to make up for how much you have to bend over for the rest of it. I think I'll be getting a PS5 and call it a day and use my current PC with its OC GTX 970 for any PC exclusives I may want to play. I just can't justify spending these kind of prices. Nvidia is going to kill PC gaming for a lot of people. I'm not sure what their strategy is except to bend people over for as long and hard as they can and only then start dropping prices one sales start taking a hit. Well, sorry, Nvidia. You need to find someone else to take advantage of.