Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super/ RTX 2070 Super: rasterisation analysis

Rise/ Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Richard Leadbetter

Updated on 3 Jul 2019

Our tests continue with a final batch of games - Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. Our test system for all benches across this entire review consists of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. A Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used to keep the power-hungry 8700K in check.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

We use FCAT for analysing GPU performance. A coloured border is overlaid in each rendered frame, the video feed from the GPU is captured and the files are then scanned with our own proprietary software. The captures are distilled down into text files which are used to dynamically generate the data presented on this page.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

While falling short as an effective workout of actual game performance, Rise of the Tomb Raider under DX12 still manages to push GPUs quite hard. Based on an older rendition of Crystal Dynamics' Foundation Engine, the benchmark seems to favour Nvidia's Pascal more strongly than Turing, so the GTX 1080 Ti moves ahead of RTX 2070 Super here, though the new card is effectively delivering Radeon 7 performance within margin of error. RTX 2060 Super matches the older 2070 at 1080p, only losing ground a touch at higher resolutions. It's consistently a touch slower than GTX 1080 - but not to any degree that's actually noticeable.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Very High, SMAA

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider ramps up the Foundation Engine to the next level, and sees Turing shine. The RTX 2060 Super can't quite match the RTX 2070, but it easily beats both Vega 64 and GTX 1080 - it's at a midway point between 1080 and 1080 Ti. Meanwhile, the RTX 2070 Super occupies a nice midpoint between 2070 and 2080 performance, and the card moves ahead of both GTX 1080 Ti, trading blows with Radeon 7.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Highest, TAA

The Witcher 3

The more powerful your graphics hardware, the more likely you are to bump into CPU limitations at 1080p and sometimes even at 1440p in The Witcher 3 - hence some of the low worst one per cent scores (and remember, we're using a Core i7 8700K locked to 4.7GHz on six cores and 12 threads here!). 1440p and higher is the only fair test for this game with most of these cards. The 2060 Super isn't as close a match to the RTX 2070 as we've seen in other benches, but it's still faster than GTX 1080 and Vega 64. Meanwhile, the 2070 Super puts in a good showing, beating Radeon 7 at lower resolutions while losing out a touch at 4K, but delivering smoother overall performance.