GeForce RTX 2070: Price, performance and features compared

If you want to live on the bleeding edge of graphics card technology without breaking the bank, the RTX 2070 is your best option.

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What is the RTX 2070?

Sitting at the most affordable end of Nvidia's new RTX 20 series graphics cards, the RTX 2070 represents the cheapest option for PC gamers looking to upgrade to the latest generation of GPUs.

As with its pricier siblings, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 2070 is powered by Nvidia's new Turing architecture. This provides a number of key benefits over the Pascal architecture used in Nvidia's previous GTX 10 graphics cards. Prime among these is the introduction of real-time ray tracing, which enables more accurate lighting and shadows that can significantly enhance the visual fidelity of in-game scenes.

Turing also marks the debut of Tensor Cores in commercial graphics cards. Tensor Cores are specially designed component matrices that greatly increase the machine-learning capabilities of a GPU. Processing data through Tensor Cores allows for more efficient and complex artificial intelligence algorithms that can produce more lifelike imagery, animations and behaviours.

What features does the RTX 2070 support?

Nvidia hasn't skimped on features with the RTX 20 line, retaining all the core benefits of the previous GTX 10 series while sprinkling in a handful of new goodies. These include:

How powerful is the RTX 2070?

In general terms, the RTX 2070 offers similar performance to the previous generation's GTX 1080. It is fully capable of hitting 60FPS at 4K resolution in even the most demanding of current AAA games. This was emphasised during the RTX 20 series announcement, where Nvidia showed off demos of Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus running at 4K/60FPS with all the graphical trimmings in full bloom.

Where the RTX 2070 could potentially outstrip its predecessor is with its support for real-time ray-tracing. Nvidia is pitching ray-tracing as the Next Big Thing, and in games that support it, the RTX 2070 does indeed perform much better than its older GTX siblings. At the time of writing, however, very few games have incorporated real-time ray-tracing, so the full potential of the RTX 2070 remains untapped.

Here's how the RTX 2070 stacks up against its previous-generation counterpart, the GTX 1080:

Product Name	Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition	MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition
Model	RTX 2070	GTX 1080
Base clock speed	1410MHz	1607MHz
Boost clock speed	1710MHz	1733MHz
Memory	8GB	8GB
Memory speed	14Gbps	10Gbps
Memory bus	256-bit	256-bit

While the RTX 2070 is certainly more powerful than its predecessor thanks to its considerably faster memory, the on-paper differences aren't necessarily night and day. That said, it's the addition of Tensor Cores and the real-time ray tracing capabilities of the Turing architecture that Nvidia is resting its claims on, so we'll have to wait and see how the RTX 2070 shakes out if and when more games take advantage of real-time ray-tracing.

RTX 2070 availability and price

Nvidia revealed the RTX 2070 alongside the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, but while the latter two cards released on 20 September 2018, the RTX 2070 arrived later in October 2018. Local pricing for the Founder's Edition of the RTX 2070 is a cool $899.

RTX 2070 specs

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