Test Setup
Please read our testing methodologies and benchmarks and review format for an explanation on our procedures.
Please note, all of the video cards being used are NVIDIA Founders Edition video cards provided directly by NVIDIA for comparison today.
GeForce RTX 2070 FE
The GeForce RTX 2070 is Founders Edition, this is important because the Founders Edition variant of it does run faster than the regular version. The GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition runs at a boost clock of 1710MHz versus the non-FE version which runs at 1620MHz. This means GPU Boost will clock it higher when gaming than a regular RTX 2070. This is ok though because in a way it represents what a built-in factory overclock custom card would perform closer with. Also, we will keep all of this in mind and the fact that the FE version is more expensive than the regular RTX 2070.
GeForce RTX 2060
The GeForce RTX 2060, while provided by NVIDIA, is not a Founders Edition, it is just a reference sample at the default stock clock speed. NVIDIA never technically made a Founders Edition RTX 2060 that was any different since these are add-in-board SKUs.
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti based video card we are using is actually an add-in-board custom video card. It is the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti LIGHTNING Z. However, we have downclocked this video card to GeForce GTX 1080 Ti clock speeds with a boost of 1582MHz and memory to 11GHz. Though because this video card has a robust custom heatsink and fan cooling unit GPU Boost will boost the clock speed slightly higher than a reference design GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
No Vega 64
In our comparison you will notice we are not including any AMD GPUs, specifically an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, for example. At this time, we do not have a sample to use for comparison and pricing and availability are hard to come by. In the short amount of time we had to complete the review we could not acquire one quick enough without costing a fortune. Having that video card in this review would not have changed the outcome.
The Radeon RX Vega 64 is on par with GeForce GTX 1080 video cards in performance, which would lineup somewhere around the RTX 2070 level of performance. It wouldn’t have made any real difference, and you can extrapolate where it would sit on the graph since RTX 2070 SUPER is faster than a GTX 1080 Ti. The Vega 64 would sit most likely between where the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 SUPER are.
The real comparison with AMD is going to be up against the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. It will be interesting to see how the SUPER video cards compare to AMD on that front.
Drivers
For all of our drivers we are using NVIDIA press drivers released for this launch, these are GeForce 431.16.