Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080
Nvidia has recently launched a new series of GPUs by the name of ‘Geforce RTX 20’, they started the lineup with their most powerful gaming graphics cards the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti.
The flagships feature the new Turing architecture but their asking price is way out of reach of most consumers.
But thankfully Nvidia has rolled out the RTX 2070 which is a much affordable option and similar to the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti it also sports the real-time Ray Tracing (RT) cores and Tensor cores.
Normally, the xx70 cards of the Nvidia GPU series are considered as the mid-range options that provide a better price to performance ratio and comes close to a high-end graphics card.
Similarly, the RTX 2070 takes full advantage of its Turing TU106 architecture and delivers really great performance, it is the most affordable GPU right now for Quad HD and playable 4K gaming experience. Of course, this card has certainly fewer numbers on spec sheet than the RTX 2080, it comes loaded with 36 ray tracing and 288 Tensor cores compared to the 2080’s 46 ray tracing and 368 Tensor cores, respectively.
As of now, we can’t say how much of a difference these noticeably fewer cores will make because this feature is not currently enabled and there is no game available right now that supports it. This card also features deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) but that is also not available for now, Nvidia has promised to release an upgrade later this year and that over 20 titles are in the works supporting DLSS. So once this technology starts functioning it will help in rendering more realistic looking environment lights and create better imagery within the game.
The Geforce RTX 2070 comes with 8 Gigabytes of GDDR6 VRAM along with a 14 GT/s memory clock and 448 GB/s memory bandwidth. Also, it sports 2,304 CUDA cores. The base clock that you get is 1,410 MHz and the boost clock is of 1,620 MHz, there is also a factory overclock option available which pushes it even further to 1,710 MHz.
The memory configuration, for the most part, is the same as the RTX 2080, both the GPUs feature 256-bit memory bus. The most annoying downside of the graphics card is that it does not feature any kind of SLI or NVLink which means that you won’t be able to do multi-GPU configuration with the RTX 2070.
So if you are looking forward to a multi GPU setup then you will have to spend some more cash to go for the RTX 2080. Moving on to the performance of this graphics card it is really surprising that it comes on par with the last generations Nvidia GTX 1080.
We tested out quite a few modern games including Far Cry 5 and Battlefield 1 at 4K resolution and the results were pretty impressive. All the titles were running at a respectable 60 to 70 Frames Per Second except for the Destiny 2 which is a real hardware demanding game, it was running at playable 40 Frames Per Second. Turning down the resolution to Quad HD boosted the frame rates to 120 FPS in nearly all the games Which are Very Impressive.
All in all, the Geforce RTX 2070 is one of the most affordable 4K gaming graphics card that you can get your hands on right now. It delivers quite an amazing performance thanks to the new Turing architecture and GDDR6 memory.
There are some downsides like no multi-GPU configuration but that is a tradeoff that you will have to make at this price. The founder’s edition of the RTX 2070 is available for $599 while the third-party vendor variants will start as low as $499.