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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webdoctors - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
You should shop around. I bought a new EVGA 1070TI from Amazon last weekend for ~$270.The regular 1070 is also that price now on Amazon website.
The 1070TI definitely seems the sweet spot for upgrading right now...
philehidiot - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Have to agree here. I'd like to see the 1070Ti for completeness but Anandtech may not have the card to hand (you simply can't always keep stock of / put your hands on every card you want), might be planning on adding it later or just thought it'd be easy enough to extrapolate where it will fall. As for value for money, I did a massive table (in pen for some reason) which calculated aggregate benchmarks for a load of cards (1080Ti, 1080, 1070Ti, 1070, Vega 64) that I was interested in and then calculated a performance per Pound (UK here) for each one. Aside from the 1080Ti (which was far better value in terms of performance per Pound), the rest had practically identical value rankings aside from the AMD card which was slightly lower. I actually ended up buying a Vega 64 as the price briefly dropped by £110 just before Turing was released which made it an absolute bargain and, seeing the performance here, I'm relatively delighted that for once the GPU market has not screwed me over. I'm guessing the prices dropped as people were expecting Turing to be amazing and now they're back up as it's just pretty meh all over and very overpriced. My old card went for £100 (I don't normally sell them, but give them away to a friend) and so my cost to upgrade was ~£300 which I'm very happy with given that I would never EVER consider spending 2080 / 2080Ti money on a GPU. The worst part for Nvidia is that I am their target market - I'm a gamer who spends a lot of money on his PC to play the latest games at decent quality settings and I'm also a professional who isn't exactly poorly off. Could I afford a 2080Ti? Easily. Would I EVER buy one? No. The price is insulting and so is the marketing. I'd have never have considered AMD before they released all that insulting marketing rubbish. They gave AMD a sale.Spunjji - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
I know at least one other person with the exact same story. It's irritating for folks like us, but as long as the market continues to swallow it they won't miss our sales!hansmuff - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
A 1070 Ti is way too close to the 2070 in perf, why bother at this point when you don't know if the new features bring anything to the table with the 2070?A lot of people have 1070's, non-Ti, and have more reason to wonder if this a significant enough upgrade. I think Anandtech did the right thing here.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Nah. 1070Ti is as low as ~$400. 1080 is as low as ~$440.http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-10...
Game performance differentials range from 6% to as much as 22%, but i'd say for 10% more on the price, you get a tiny bit more than 10% of the performance uptick. Hence, 1080 is a better overall value in terms of price/performance to 1070 Ti.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Not according to Techpowerup and German prices. The cheapest 1070ti is 430€, the cheapest 1080 is 480€. The relative performance towards a 2080Ti is 62%/55%/50% for the 1070Ti in 1080p/1440p/2160p and 66%/58%/52% for the 1080 in the same resolutions. That means the 1080 delivers only 95%/94%/93% of the performance/€ compared to the 1070Ti. Things are so close though as to warrant a real inspection when seeing a deal for one card or another.Vayra - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
While true, once overclocked, the 1080 can stretch its legs a bit more due to the faster GDDR5X, making the lead a bit larger, and its additional shaders also benefit a bit more from a 'similar' clock to a 1070ti. They're almost a perfect match if you consider perf/dollar, and in that case the 1080 is and was always the better choice, because higher absolute performance should usually result in a worse perf/dollar number.Marlin1975 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
I'll take a $329 RTX2080. Comparison chart is off.Performance is not bad, but the price is. Until the price comes down the 1080 seems like a much better buy, esp with rebates on some now.
Koenig168 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Paying for RTX which we cannot use ATM and not sure we want, bearing in mind the performance hit.Antoine. - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Why do you compare in your final words the RTX2070 to the GTX1070? Just because they have the same marketing endname does not mean it's in the best interest of your readers to compare these two.The only relevant guide here is the pricing of course! RTX2070 have the same pricetag as GTX1080TI. Comparing it to GTX1070TI is a stretch but why not. But the 1070?! a 400-dollar card?