GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 Super Review: Nvidia Preemptively Strikes Navi

Inserted right between the $350 GeForce RTX 2060 and $500 RTX 2070 Super, we can’t imagine that anyone actually asked for a $400 GeForce RTX 2060 Super.

A better way to look at it is that the 2060 Super is offering near-2070 performance for $100 less. It performs within a few percent or so of the 2070, so this is almost like Nvidia lopping $100 off the 2070's MSRP. You do lose around 5% of the graphics cores, but retain the full 8GB of VRAM and memory bandwidth of that card. This is more like the kind of pricing we should have seen from the 20-series to begin with, and I think the cards would have been a lot better received if that had been the case.

Back when there weren’t any ray tracing- or DLSS-enabled games to show off the Turing architecture’s most prominent features, those were unforgiving comparisons.

DLSS has proven to be more or less useless, being little more than a mediocre upscaling method in practice. It might not be bad if it looked or performed better than all other forms of upscaling, but it doesn't. A number of games use other upscaling methods that are not only better, but also don't require any special hardware, allowing them to run on any card while offering better performance than DLSS for a given level of image quality. So, as far as that feature is concerned, the comparisons are even worse now than they were when people didn't know what DLSS had to offer. It's gone from being a potentially useful feature to being a non-feature.

And there are still only a few games released so far that support raytraced lighting effects, and enabling them still kills performance at the resolutions most people are likely buying these cards for. Raytraced effects have the potential to improve visuals, but the current cards don't have nearly enough RT cores to run them well. I suppose the Super lineup helps a bit by making slightly more RT cores available at a given price point, but it's not nearly enough to prevent the performance hit from being substantial relative to the minor improvements to visuals. Perhaps next year's cards will make hybrid raytracing more viable.

Still, I do agree that if two cards otherwise offer similar performance at a given price level, hardware raytracing support is definitely something that can help differentiate one card from another. Enabling those effects might cause a big hit to performance, but at least the option is there. For that reason, I think the 5700 and 5700 XT may have a hard time justifying their launch prices compared to the Super cards, unless they perform significantly better than expected. The pricing seemed a bit underwhelming from the start, and even without the Super cards available, I felt each of those Navi cards should have been priced about $50 lower. The initial 20-series pricing was underwhelming from the start, and AMD didn't seem to be pushing value much beyond that, despite these cards launching the better part of a year later. AMD had the opportunity to build some hype for their new generation of cards through competitive pricing, but appear to have followed Nvidia's lead in price-gouging their new cards, despite not bringing anything really new to the table. Better pricing from the start could have prevented Nvidia from raining on their parade with the Super cards.

And on that note, the Radeon VII is the real loser compared to the Super lineup. Its value was already a bit questionable for anyone not utilizing its 16GB of VRAM for certain professional applications, since the RTX 2080 was already offering more gaming performance and dedicated RT hardware with lower power demands for about the same price, but now the 2070 Super will be offering similar performance along with RT hardware for almost $200 less. That makes the VII a no-go for just about anyone interested in it for gaming, and due to its large amount of expensive HBM2 VRAM, I doubt AMD could drop its price by $200 to compete.

cryoburner said:

A better way to look at it is that the 2060 Super is offering near-2070 performance for $100 less. It performs within a few percent or so of the 2070, so this is almost like Nvidia lopping $100 off the 2070's MSRP. You do lose around 5% of the graphics cores, but retain the full 8GB of VRAM and memory bandwidth of that card. This is more like the kind of pricing we should have seen from the 20-series to begin with, and I think the cards would have been a lot better received if that had been the case.

That's another way to look at it, yes. I see it as where 2070 should have been at launch, agreed!

Why don't the charts show the specs of the old vs. new cards, like pretty much every other site???

chill1221 said:

Glad to see my 11GB 1080 TI still hanging tough!

By comparison with Turing and especially these Supers, the efficiency of the Pascal cards seems almost exquisite.

I hope their 7 nm cards bring a return to the Wattage of that era.

cryoburner said:

DLSS has proven to be more or less useless, being little more than a mediocre upscaling method in practice. It might not be bad if it looked or performed better than all other forms of upscaling, but it doesn't.

I think the problem is they tried to do too much with it. The more sophisticated the model, the longer inferencing takes and the less time is left for conventional rendering. So, they could either go with a sophisticated model designed to enhance low-quality AA, or a simple model that's basically just an improved scaler and able to be paired with decent AA. Because the former is easier to sell, they went with that. However, maybe they should've just gone with the latter.

Anyway, it's essentially a software feature (although it depends on the tensor cores). So, there's always a chance they'll reverse course.

cryoburner said:

AMD had the opportunity to build some hype for their new generation of cards through competitive pricing, but appear to have followed Nvidia's lead in price-gouging their new cards, despite not bringing anything really new to the table. Better pricing from the start could have prevented Nvidia from raining on their parade with the Super cards.

First, it's much easier to lower prices than to raise them. So, AMD could quickly come down from its launch pricing.

Second, I see the Super cards as pretty much inevitable, no matter what AMD did with pricing. The only real variable was whether and how Nvidia adjusted their pricing. The big question is whose price floor is higher. If it does come to a price war, how much can they each drop?

I've always seen the RTX features as very much about creating enough differentiation to justify higher pricing. However, they're far from the must-haves Nvidia surely hoped. As such, I think they're not yet sufficient to keep the RTX cards out of a price war. Maybe in the next gen, but not now.

cryoburner said:

the Radeon VII is the real loser compared to the Super lineup.

It's true and a fair point, but you surely know it wasn't designed as a gaming card. The way to think of it is as a Titan - something of a specialty product that's soon to be surpassed by the next generation. Like the Kepler Titan and the Titan V, it's a professional GPU that they let gamers and prosumers have at a more accessible price point.

cangelini said:

...wouldn’t want to play the game at any detail preset that has Keanu look like less than the beautiful man he is.

You meant to say "breathtaking", of course.

bit_user said:

Second, I see the Super cards as pretty much inevitable, no matter what AMD did with pricing.

Inevitable, absolutely. But when, in what form, and at what price points? Would they have been satisfied to just sell FE or FE+ as "Super" if there was no competition? Or even if they pushed further than that, would the 2060 Super be unlocked to near-2070 levels, or would they still have gimped it slightly - retain the narrower memory interface perhaps? I mean it's all kind of academic at this point but it's an interesting thought exercise. I believe the timing and other decisions were influenced by Navi. With that being said the Super models as-spec'd are a substantial boost and should really make this an interesting fight!

Anyway yeah, the pricing may shift around a bit in the coming months. Having a high price floor is one of the things that bit AMD in the hind with their Vega lineup. This time AMD has both a moderate sized chip and conventional GDDR, though the new process is doubtless more expensive at the moment. The other wildcard is drivers - RDNA is supposedly different enough that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's decent room for optimization. That's not really a positive at launch though, but it's something else to chew on.

bit_user said:

It's true and a fair point, but you surely know it wasn't designed as a gaming card. The way to think of it is as a Titan - something of a specialty product that's soon to be surpassed by the next generation. Like the Kepler Titan and the Titan V, it's a professional GPU that they let gamers and prosumers have at a more accessible price point.

Indeed, it's got a ton of crunching horsepower for a relatively low price. The FP64 performance in particular is untouchable at that price.