NVIDIA recently launched their refreshed Turing based RTX graphics card last month. Their new lineup includes the new GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER (new product), RTX 2070 SUPER (replacing RTX 2070) and RTX 2080 SUPER (replacing RTX 2080) graphics card. Since these cards are generally available in stores islandwide now, it’s about time for us to find their place in the market, especially when compared to the new AMD Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards.
In today’s review, we are going to focus on the RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card, which targets the 1080p and 1440p gaming resolutions. We will compare these two cards to the new AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 graphics card, as well as their predecessor, the RTX 2070. If you are interested to know more about the RTX 2080 SUPER, you can read more about it in our dedicated review article here.
If I were to put myself in the shoes of a gamer who’s looking to upgrade his/her graphics card, which will I choose? We will focus on gaming performance, temperature and power consumption.
Introduction – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER is a new addition to the RTX graphics card family. These new graphics card are not going to replace the current RTX 2060, which will continue to be in the market for those looking for an affordable card with ray tracing features. Instead, the RTX 2060 SUPER will come between the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 SUPER, giving gamers more choices to choose from when selecting a graphics card for their need.
| RTX 2070 | RTX 2060 SUPER | RTX 2070 SUPER | RTX 2080 SUPER | |
| NVIDIA CUDA Cores | 2,304 | 2,176 | 2,560 | 3,072 |
| Base Clock | 1,410 | 1,470 | 1,605 | 1,650 |
| Boost Clock | 1,620 | 1,650 | 1,770 | 1,815 |
| Tensor Cores | 288 | 272 | 320 | 384 |
| RT Cores | 36 | 34 | 40 | 48 |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 |
Just simply based on specifications comparison, the RTX 2070 SUPER is considerably more powerful than the RTX 2070. It not only has an increased GPU clock, but also a higher number of CUDA Cores and Tensor Cores altogether. This essentially means that the RTX 2070 SUPER is quite different from the RTX 2070. It’s a whole new beast onto itself.
Design
The NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER we have are both Founders Edition cards. They come directly from NVIDIA and sport the same Founders Edition look like its RTX 2000 series predecessors.
The RTX 2060 SUPER is shorter than the RTX 2070 SUPER in terms of length, as it does not contain as many CUDA cores or RT Cores that requires a more complex power circuitry to properly operate it. This also explains why the RTX 2060 SUPER only requires a single 8-pin supplementary power connector, unlike the RTX 2070 SUPER that needs both an 8-pin and 6-pin connector.
Understandably, the RTX 2060 SUPER would be made for those that are more budget conscious. Perhaps, this is also why NVIDIA has decided to include a DVI port on the RTX 2060 SUPER instead of another Display Port that’s found on the RTX 2070 SUPER. Other than this main difference, both cards still come with two other Display Ports and a single HDMI port. Additionally, each card also comes with a USB Type-C port that’s mainly used for a VirtualLink connection with VR Headsets.
Test Objectives, Methodologies and Setup
As mentioned in our opening, we wanted to find out how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER fairs when compared to competition – AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700. Moreover, we also want to understand the performance improvement from the RTX 2070 to its replacement RTX 2070 SUPER, so as to see if it is worth to upgrade if you already own the RTX 2070.
In review of the RTX 2080 SUPER, we determined that the RTX 2080 SUPER is minimally required for a 4K gaming system. Therefore, the focus of this review on the test subjects will be on 1080p and 1440p resolution.
We are going to run synthetic graphics benchmark 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike on each graphics card. The games that we will use as benchmarks for the graphics card are as follows:
| Game | Resolution | Settings |
| World of Tanks Encore | 1080p, 1440p | Ultra Settings |
| Final Fantasy XV | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Middle Earth Shadow of War | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| F1 2018 (Australia) | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| DOTA 2 | 1080p, 1440p | As per Benchmark Guide |
| Assassins Creed Odyssey | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Tom Clancy Division 2 | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Total War: Warhammer 2 | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Deus Ex: Mankind Divided | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
| Far Cry New Dawn | 1080p, 1440p | High Settings |
The tests are conducted with our latest AMD setup. Specifications are as follows:
| Specs | Main System |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 3900X |
| RAM | G.Skill Trident Royal 3600MHz, 2 x 8GB DDR4 Kit |
| Main Storage | Transcend PCIe SSD 110 512GB (OS) |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (Reference) AMD Radeon RX 5700 (Reference) GALAX GeForce RTX 2070 White (1-click OC) |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X570 AORUS MASTER |
| CPU Cooler | AMD Wraith Spire RGB Cooler |
| OS | Windows 10 Pro 64 bit |
| Drivers | AMD Radeon 19.7.1 NVIDIA 431.56 |
Performance Results
In the 3DMark Time Spy test, both the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER took a decisive victory. However, when it comes to DX11 based 3DMark Fire Strike, the results weren’t as optimistic. In this test, we can see that the RTX 2060 SUPER was even slightly slower than the RX 5700. The RTX 2070 SUPER also did not perform better than the RX 5700XT from AMD.
At 1080p resolution, all the cards performed very well. In fact, all of the results were very close to each other. We saw that most of the times, their performance results overlapped one another. Putting our attention back to the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER, they were mostly the top performing cards. However, we also should not undermine the performance of the AMD RX 5700 XT, which was seen as a good performer between the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER.
When it comes to gaming at a higher resolution, all the graphics cards in our tests possessed a very different characteristic. Nonetheless, there is still a tussle between the graphics card from both brands. Most of the times, the RTX 2070 SUPER will still come up on top and take the decisive lead. Interestingly, the RTX 2070 stood out in our tests, as it was able to consistently produce very good results.
Temperature and Power Consumption
The NVIDIA graphics card had an obvious advantage when it comes to temperatures. On load, they all stayed at a conservative temperature of 70°C. While for the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series, they heat up much higher than expected.
Even though AMD has an advantage in the type of process technology (Radeon RX 5700 series are 7nm GPUs as compared to 12nm on the NVIDIA RTX 2000 series), their cards were seen to run hotter and consume relatively high power. This really shows how inefficient the Radeon RX 5700 are, when compared to the NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER. We also took note that the RTX 2070 SUPER also consumed quite a fair bit of power when on load as well, even though its maximum temperature on load remained lower.
Conclusion
Is the RTX 2070 SUPER better than the RTX 2070? Definitely. Theoretically, with a higher number of CUDA cores and GPU clock speed, the card should perform better. Our results also proved our hypothesis. The question is : Is it worth the upgrade to the RTX 2070 SUPER if you already have an RTX 2070? In our opinion, no. Despite the fact that the RTX 2070 SUPER was able produce significant higher FPS in some games when compared to the RTX 2070, both cards were able to perform very well at a considerably smooth frame rate. If you are looking to upgrade, the next tier of upgrade should be a 4K capable graphics card – the RTX 2080 SUPER.
How does the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2060 SUPER compare to competition from AMD’s latest products? In terms of performance, we saw that there were times that AMD performed better, depending on the games that were tested. But in general, the RTX 2070 SUPER comes out on top, followed by the RX 5700 XT, then the RTX 2060 SUPER, and lastly, the RX 5700. We have to say that if power consumption and temperature weren’t too much of a concern, AMD has two very competitive graphics card up for the challenge with NVIDIA this time.
Regardless, there are still no cards that supports Ray Tracing as well as NVIDIA. If you are intending to play games that can take advantage of the Ray Tracing or AI engines from NVIDIA RTX graphics card, there is no reason you should consider any other cards in the market. However, if FPS is all you care about, then you will have a lot more to think about at this graphics card segment.
