The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super & RTX 2060 Super Review: Smaller Numbers, Bigger Performance
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
The 2019 GPU Benchmark Suite & The Test
As we’re kicking off a new(ish) generation of video cards, we’re also kicking off a new generation of the AnandTech GPU benchmark suite.
For 2019 most of the suite has been refreshed to include games released in the last year. The latest iteration of the Tomb Raider franchise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is 2019’s anchor title and is the game used for power/temperature/noise testing as well as game performance testing. Also making its introduction to the GPU benchmark suite for the first time is an Assassin’s Creed game, thanks to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s extra-handy built-in benchmark.
For 2019 Ashes of the Singularity has been rotated out, so we’re empty on RTSes at the moment. But as an alternative we have Microsoft’s popular Forza Horizon 4, which marks the first time a Forza game has been included in the suite.
AnandTech GPU Bench 2019 Game List | ||||
Game | Genre | Release Date | API | |
Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Action/TPS | Sept. 2018 | DX12 | |
F1 2019 | Racing | Jun. 2019 | DX12 | |
Assassin's Creed Odyssey | Action/Open World | Oct. 2018 | DX11 | |
Metro Exodus | FPS | Feb. 2019 | DX12 | |
Strange Brigade | TPS | Aug. 2018 | Vulkan | |
Total War: Three Kingdoms | TBS | May. 2019 | DX11 | |
The Division 2 | FPS | Mar. 2019 | DX12 | |
Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open world | Apr. 2015 | DX11 | |
Forza Horizon 4 | Racing | Oct. 2018 | DX12 |
All told, I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of DirectX 12-enabled AAA games available this year. More than half of the benchmark suite is using DX12, with both AMD and NVIDIA cards showing performance gains across all of the games using this API. So this is a far cry from the early days of DX12, where using the low-level API would often send performance backwards. And speaking of low-level APIs, I’ve also thrown in Strange Brigade for this iteration, as it’s one of the only major Vulkan games to be released in the past year.
Finally, I’ve also kept Grand Theft Auto V as our legacy game for 2019. Despite being released for the PC over 4 years ago – and for game consoles 2 years before that – the game continues to be one of the top selling games on Steam. And even with its age, the scalability of the game means that it’s a heavy enough load to challenge even the latest video cards.
As for our hardware testbed, it too has been updated for the 2019 video card release cycle.
Internally we’ve made a pretty big change, going from an Intel HEDT platform (Core i7-7820X) to a standard desktop platform based around an overclocked Core i9-9900K and Z390 chipset. While we’ve used HEDT platforms for the GPU testbed for the last decade, HEDT is becoming increasingly irrelevant/compromised for gaming; while the extra PCIe lanes are nice, these platforms haven’t delivered the best CPU performance for games as of late.
By contrast, desktop processors with 8 cores now provide more than enough cores, and they also provide far better clockspeeds, delivering more of the single/lightly-threaded performance that games need. Furthermore, as SLI and Crossfire are on the rocks, the extra PCIe lanes aren’t as necessary as they once were.
On a side note, I had originally hoped to cycle in a Ryzen 3000 platform at this point, particularly for PCIe 4.0. However the timing of all of these hardware launches meant that we needed to go with an established platform, as it takes a week or so to build and validate a new GPU testbed. Plus with Ryzen 3000 not launching for another week, we wouldn’t have been able to use it for this review anyhow.
Otherwise the rest of our 2019 GPU testbed is relatively straightforward. With 32GB of RAM and a high-end Phison E12-based NVMe SSD, the system and any video cards being tested as well-fed. Enclosing all of this for our real-world style testing is our trusty NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
CPU: | Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Z390 Taichi |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Founders Edition AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 |
Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 431.15 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.6.3 |
OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1903) |
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BenSkywalker - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
I don't know about that, maybe Ryan just has no clue and that's why he rigged the test to make the singular legacy card look better?Can you imagine if they benched the Vega64 in a game supporting ASync compute and disabled it for their benches? This is obviously worse as this isn't just about how instructions are scheduled, but has a major impact on image quality while being faster, but you should give him the benefit of the doubt, ignorance or maybe even promotional considerations from other parties to the site is what caused what appears to be fanboy shilling.
Korguz - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
which one eva02langley ?? i count 2 or 3 alone in these comments...Phynaz - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Right there ^Korguz - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
and there ^ phynazRyan Smith - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
"why did you do this?"Ben, it's not the answer you're going to like, but it's for apples-to-apples comparisons. I need to be able to compare cards from all vendors (including Intel, if necessary), all running the same features. This is the same benchmark suite you'll see again in 4 days, as all of this is standardized for future use.
BenSkywalker - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link
Then why bother reviewing these products? You are running a much lower quality setting that runs markedly slower to appease the vendor that refuses to support the feature in their drivers while simultaneously leaving out the singular performance characteristic that we couldn't figure out by looking at the specs.If AMD supported an OpenCL mode in say LuxMark that was both faster and higher accuracy but it wasn't supported by nVidia would you honestly not run it?
Also, you didn't even mention it. We ran lower quality settings that were slower on these card because AMD refuses to add driver support would have at least explained why you did it.
Furthermore, the amount of die space dedicated to this feature inr these parts to not see a singular benchmark? Why bother reviewing them at all?
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 6, 2019 - link
I'm glad Ryan does these reviews. I expect everyone who reads them does. Heck, you're reading it...catavalon21 - Sunday, July 21, 2019 - link
" I need to be able to compare cards from all vendors (including Intel, if necessary), all running the same features."What? The test includes a CUDA-only benchmark (which is fine), but how is that in any way aligned with your previous comment?
akyp - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
Can we please have more cards in the benchmarks? Would like to know how the 2070S compares to 1080Ti, for example.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - link
More cards will be going into Bench ahead of the RX 5700 launch. This review was very compressed for time due to everything else going on and the need to setup (and validate) a new GPU benchmark suite.