Nvidia RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super Review

Introduction

The Nvidia RTX cards brought Ray Tracing and improved Super Sampling to the market and there is no doubting at all that they have proved to be a roaring success.

The RTX 2060 in particular has been flying off the shelves almost as fast as Nvidia can produce the Turing GPUs that power them. It's  an absolute monster at the most popular gaming resolution, 1920x1080 without costing a kidney. That isn't to say that it can't handle the higher resolutions, merely that it is a fit and forget option at 1080P, letting you put every game settings up to the maximum without a moments consideration as to the impact upon your frame rate. Add in the benefits to image quality that Ray Tracing brings in supported titles, and the ability of the Tensor cores to give you amazing image fidelity with Deep Learning Super Sampling - DLSS - and actually gain you frames per second rather than cost you them as most anti-aliasing technologies do, and it's a clear winner. The RTX 2070 is a little more expensive but a little more powerful, otherwise having all the benefits of the RTX 2060 but with better performance at the higher resolutions. There is also an RTX 2080 Super available, but for today we're just looking at the two more mainstream priced models.

Nvidia are never one to rest on their laurels and whilst in the old days an updated card was usually given the Titanium - Ti - branding, the newest additions to the Nvidia RTX range have the suffix of Super. Hearing the word Super we either start thinking of Mario, or singing songs from South Park. With slightly more hardware to push even higher frame rates, we have both the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super for review today. Below and on the next page we'll look at the changes on the RTX 2060 Super, then move on to the RTX 2070 Super, before finding out through our benchmarking suite how much extra performance you can expect to get from these new graphics cards.

RTX 2060 Super Specifications

As you would hope to find on any product update, the GeForce RTX 2060 Super is bigger and faster than its stablemate. The RTX 2060 Super has 4 extra Shader Modules, which bring 256 extra CUDA Cores to bear. CUDA Cores are the primary technical sledgehammer with which the Nvidia cards crack the nut of high image quality whilst retaining high frame rates, so giving the card some more to play with should give a nice boost to performance. Certainly if you look at the improvements to both the calculative ability of the Tensor Cores and amount of Giga Rays the card can handle they are big steps in comparison to the abilities of the regular RTX 2060. 0.7 TFLOPS (Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second) for the INT32 and FP32 calculations, whilst the Tensor Cores see an even bigger boost leaping up from 51.6 TFLOPS to 57.4 TFLOPS. With an additional Giga Ray (up to 6 from 5) alongside faster Texel fill rate and more, faster memory the RTX 2060 Super is almost a match for the current RTX 2070. Impressive improvements. 

Now let's see what the Super additions have brought to the RTX 2070 Super.