NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Review: The Perfect Card For 1440p

Introduction

NVIDIA has released two out of three of its Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards in the last month, with the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080, but now it's time for the more mid-range of the RTX series (at least so far) with the release of the GeForce RTX 2070.

The timing was extremely tight on this one, with my GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition only turning up 24 hours ago. I've had less than a few hours with the card but got all of my traditional testing done. There are custom RTX 2070s turning up as I type, so I'll do more of an analysis as I go through the samples. For now, this is a quick and dirty look at the GeForce RTX 2070, a new Turing-based offering that was built for 1440p gaming.

It has been slightly knocked down in terms of CUDA cores and GDDR6 memory from its bigger brothers, with the TU106 being used compared to the TU104 on the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080. The TU106 and thus RTX 2070 feature 2304 CUDA cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 at 14Gbps. The RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 both feature the TU104 GPU with 4352 CUDA cores and 11GB of GDDR6. The GDDR6 memory on the RTX 2070 stays at its high 14Gbps of bandwidth, offering a huge improvement in memory bandwidth over the GeForce GTX 1070.

One of the major changes with the GeForce RTX 2070 is that it doesn't include an NVLink connector, which means no multi-GPU actions with RTX 2070s in SLI/NVLink. If NVIDIA allowed this, you could buy two RTX 2070s for $1000 or so and have some stellar performance that would easily beat the RTX 2080 Ti... at least in games where using multi-GPUs is a good thing.

This is something to keep in mind going into the review, as the GTX 1070/1080/1080 Ti all have SLI support for future upgrade paths while the RTX 2070 does not. I don't think it's that big of a deal, but it could show a trend going forward for NVIDIA: no more SLI on cards under $500.

Pricing & Availability

NVIDIA is pricing its new GeForce RTX 20 series cards at much higher prices than previous-gen launches, but then again the company never launches its 'Ti' variant at launch so these are different times. The new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition launches at $1199, the same price as the Pascal-based TITAN Xp. But the RTX 2080 Ti overall, starts at $999 while NVIDIA's higher-end Founders Edition knocks the price up to $1199.

• GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - $999-$1199
• GeForce RTX 2080 - $699-$799
• GeForce RTX 2070 - $499-$599

The new GeForce RTX 2070 starts from $499 for a stock card from an AIB, while custom cards will be somewhere above $500, and NVIDIA's own GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition will cost $599.