Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070: performance analysis

The purpose of this page is to demonstrate the range in performance you can expect to see across the various models of the RTX 2070 on the market. In providing the Gaming-Z version of the card, MSI has effectively gifted us one of the fastest RTX 2070s money can buy, with a massive 210MHz boost to core clock out of the box with no user tweaking required. Typically the card boosts to a remarkable 1920MHz under load here, and there may well be additional performance to unlock via a touch of extra core clock, plus a memory overclock (our GDDR6 modules run at stock speeds in all instances here).

In attempting to give you some idea of the performance delta across the range, I opted to bench at three specific settings, downclocking the Gaming-Z first to Founders Editions clocks, and then further down to reference frequencies. This is important as Nvidia and third party card suppliers have ensured that there are reference cards out there at the recommended retail price, with products such as MSI's own Armor 8G version garnering some positive reviews, providing reasonable value while at the same time offering overclocking potential that brings performance into line and slightly beyond the Gaming-Z once you apply the relevant tweaks.

All of our tests here are at 1440p resolution - the gaming heartland of the 2070 - and Crysis 3 aside, the performance range here is fascinating. At reference clocks, the RTX 2070 is mostly on par or a touch faster than its nearest last-gen counterpart, the GTX 1080, while the various shades of overclocking edge performance closer to GTX 1080 Ti performance.

Battlefield 1

The Frostbite engine is very forward-looking, even in its two-year-old state here in Battlefield 1. This is the kind of workload that Turing appears to excel at, reflected in in the figures here. RX 2070 reference clocks easily propel the card ahead of GTX 1080 (random explosions do lesson that card's lowest one per cent scores, not really indicative of gameplay). And in a pattern you'll see frequently across this page, the Founders Edition offers a 3.5 per cent boost over reference clocks, extending to almost eight per cent with the fast Gaming-Z.

Crysis 3

Legacy titles can see the RTX cards offer smaller boosts compared to their Pascal predecessors and Crysis 3 is a good example of this. While there was a slight regression in performance for RTX 2080 up against the GTX 1080 Ti, the RTX 2070 holds its own - just - against the GTX 1080 when running at reference clocks. The performance uplift for Founders Edition clocks is in the region of three per cent, rising to eight per cent when factoring in the Gaming-Z's prodigious +210MHz core overclock.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

And we're back to a more modern game engine, as performance is analysed in Shadow of the Tomb Raider's excellent DX12 benchmark. It's another example of how a new game offers a decent performance uplift over the Pascal architecture. Once again, we should expect to see the FE version of the RTX 2070 delivering a four per cent ballpark increase in frame-rates, rising to eight per cent with the Gaming-Z frequencies.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• DLSS - Deep Learning Super-Sampling: Performance Analysis
• Assassin's Creed Unity, Battlefield 1, Crysis 3, Far Cry Primal - Rasterisation Analysis Part 1
• Ghost Recon Wildlands, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3, Wolfenstein 2 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 2
• Which version to buy? Reference clocks vs Founders Edition vs Gaming-Z [This Page]
• GeForce RTX 2070 - the Digital Foundry verdict