NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition review: Petite powerhouse

A smaller Turing card

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 is the company's most affordable Turing GPU to date. At US$599 for the Founders Edition card, it is far more accessible than its bigger siblings, the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. The biggest question then is about performance. How fast is it and is it a worthy alternative to the other Turing cards?

But first, let's talk about the card itself. It features the same machine-finished aluminum shroud as the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti Founders Edition, so a lot of what I said in my review then applies now as well. Put simply, the card boasts impeccable build quality and really feels better made than the vast majority of custom cards on the market.

There's also the same wraparound shroud that extends over the end of the card to eventually form the PCB backplate. 

However, there are some small changes this time. The single 8-pin power connector has been shifted to card's end, which means it's slightly more accessible, especially if you have a small chassis. Having said that, the GeForce RTX 2070 is actually a great fit for anyone looking to put together a powerful, compact build. The 2-slot Founders Edition card is much more compact than its more powerful siblings, measuring just 228.6mm long, which means it barely extends past the edge of an ATX motherboard. 

The card itself features a 1,410MHz base clock and 1,710MHz boost clock, a nice bump over the reference 1,620MHz boost. It is also equipped with a 6-phase power supply and the same dual-axial 13-blade fans as the other Turing Founders Edition cards. There is no NVLink connector however, which means that the GeForce RTX 2070 won't actually support SLI.

The display outputs are also different from the more expensive Turing cards. Instead of the single HDMI 2.0b connector and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, NVIDIA has replaced one of the DisplayPort connectors with a DVI-DL output. The USB-C port remains, however. 

Finally, the GeForce RTX RTX 2070 is based on the TU106 GPU, a scaled down version of the TU102 and TU104 GPUs used in the higher-end cards.

It features a total of 36 SMs, comprising 2,304 CUDA cores, 36 RT cores and 288 Tensor cores. In addition, the memory subsystem consists of eight 32-bit memory controllers, which gives the card 256-bit memory bus width. This is paired with 8GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14,000MHz, which gives a total memory bandwidth of 448GB/s. 

Unsurprisingly, the card is less power hungry as well, with a 185W TDP compared to the 225W and 260W on the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti respectively.

Test Setup

The detailed specifications of our new graphics card testbed system is as follows:-

• Intel Core i7-8086K (4.0GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
• ASUS ROG Strix Maximus X Hero (Intel Z370)
• 4 x 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-35)
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
• ASUS PB287Q, 4K monitor

The full line-up of graphics cards and their driver versions are listed below:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 (ForceWare 416.33)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (ForceWare 411.51)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (ForceWare 411.51)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (ForceWare 399.24)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (ForceWare 399.24)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (ForceWare 399.24)

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Benchmarks

Next up, here's a list of all the benchmarks used:

• 3DMark
• VRMark
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Far Cry 5
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Tom Clancy's The Division

We used the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark and stress test in 3DMark for our temperature  and power consumption tests respectively.

3DMark

The synthetic 3DMark benchmark tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stress your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

Right from the outset, it's clear that the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is miles ahead of the GeForce RTX 2070. However, the latter does come close to the GeForce RTX 2080. In the 4K Fire Strike Ultra test, the GeForce RTX 2080 was ahead of the 2070 by just under 15 per cent. 

However, the GeForce RTX 2080 outdid both the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 Ti from the previous generation, edging ahead of the former by around 8 per cent.

VRMark

Futuremark’s VRMark benchmark is designed to assess a PC’s ability to handle high-performance headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. If a PC passes the Orange Room test, it is ready for the latter two systems. The second graph also shows how the cards fared against the benchmark's target of an average FPS of 109. 

All the tested cards are more than capable of handling the benchmark, and it looks like they're actually so fast that the CPU is starting to become a limiting factor (and that's considering we've already plugged in the fastest stock-clocked Intel processor in our test rig). In fact, there's hardly any significant difference at the upper end between the top Turing and Pascal cards. 

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity has long been the poster child for the performance benefits a low-level API like DirectX 12 can bring. It is based on the Nitrous engine and can be extremely punishing thanks to the huge number of onscreen units and the sheer level of detail accorded to each unit. However, the CPU does become the limiting factor at lower resolutions and settings. 

The GeForce RTX 2070 continued to outstrip the GeForce GTX 1080 here, even posting decent performance at 4K resolution. However, it's not quite the monster that the GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti are, so you won't be tearing through games at 4K with it. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided features just about every trick to make your game look pretty, including things like volumetric and dynamic lighting, screenspace reflections, and cloth physics. Even though it was released in 2016, the game is capable of bringing even the most powerful systems to their knees. 

The GeForce RTX 2070 does pretty well in Mankind Divided, as long as you don't crank the resolution up to 4K. At 1440p and Ultra settings, it was around 17 per cent faster than the GeForce GTX 1080.

Far Cry 5

The latest installment in the Far Cry series is actually an AMD launch title, so it'll be interesting to see how the green camp fares here. 

The GeForce RTX 2070 handles itself well here. At 1440p and Ultra settings, it was 11 per cent quicker than the GeForce GTX 1080, but 15 per cent behind the GeForce RTX 2080.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

The GeForce RTX 2070 handily dealt with most of what Shadow of War threw at it. It doesn't manage to hit 60FPS at the 4K resolution however, but it's still plenty fast at the other resolutions and settings. In addition, it was roughly 20 per cent quicker than the GeForce GTX 1080 on average.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

NVIDIA has mentioned Shadow of the Tomb Raider a lot lately, largely because it will be one of the first games to support its RTX technology through a post-release patch. At the time of writing however, the patch hasn't dropped yet, so the results still deal with conventional performance metrics. 

A similar picture played out here, with the GeForce RTX 2070 sitting snugly between the GeForce GTX 1080 and RTX 2080.

Temperature and power consumption

The improvements NVIDIA made to the cooling solution on its Founders Edition cards are plain as day here, and all the Turing cards posted lower temperatures despite being more powerful. The cards are also fairly quiet, and I don't see this being a problem for most people.

The GeForce RTX 2070 also posted the lowest peak temperatures, probably owing to its lower power envelope compared to the other Turing cards.

Faster than a GeForce GTX 1080

In some ways, the GeForce RTX 2070 may be NVIDIA's most attractive Turing card yet. It doesn't reside anywhere near the lofty heights of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, but it's also far more affordable at US$599 (half the price of the latter actually) and still offers very good performance. 

The card still comes with ray tracing acceleration baked in, but I feel like that isn't really the point of the card. After all, the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti pack greater ray tracing prowess, and even their utility in the coming year is still in question because we're nowhere close to mainstream developer support yet. 

Instead, the GeForce RTX 2070 is a nice signifier of progress. I'd argue that cards like this are more interesting than the usual flagship models because you get to see how flagship levels of performance are trickling further down the product stack. The GeForce RTX 2070 is faster than the GeForce RTX 1080, a fact reflected by its slightly higher price tag. 

Unfortunately, while the price makes sense vis-à-vis the GeForce GTX 1080, it also represents a painful uptick in price along NVIDIA's entire line-up. After all, the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition launched at just US$449. 

Should you get the GeForce RTX 2070? If you own a GeForce GTX 1070 or below, you'll see a pretty nice performance boost. The GeForce RTX 2070 also has me looking forward to NVIDIA's true mainstream card, which is presumably called the GeForce RTX 2060. Turing may be expensive, but there's no denying that it serves up some sweet, sweet performance. 

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