Conclusion
It was interesting going back in time and benchmarking a GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER in 2024 in modern games. We are running some newer games, that weren’t a gleam in the RTX 2070 SUPER’s eye in 2019. The GeForce RTX 20 series were the first GPUs from NVIDIA to include hardware Ray Tracing cores and Tensor Cores.
The GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER itself wasn’t the highest-end GPU either, it was a $499 GPU at the time of launch. To expect Ray Tracing to be playable, even at 1080p, was a crap shoot back in that day and time. However, games have come a long way since then in their implementation and optimizations for Ray Tracing. Then there are other games, like Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 that have implemented Path Tracing, something the RTX 2070 SUPER was never designed for, but can ‘technically’ run thanks to the support.
If you are looking at an upgrade in 2024, coming from the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and you paid around $499 back then, in today’s dollars (calculated for inflation), that would be around the price of the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER today. When we looked at what that means in terms of performance gains, we found that it does vary between games.
Performance
We experienced that the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER provides between 100-130% performance increase at 1440p, though some games were under that. This resulted in the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER allowing a playable gameplay experience in all games at 1440p without needing upscaling. For the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, upscaling was needed in several games to make it actually playable at 1440p, and even then some games did not have the best experience. We ran into several games where it seemed as if VRAM capacity constraints of 8GB were cropping up with the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER at 1440p, such as Horizon Forbidden West.
When it comes to Ray Tracing, the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER falls way behind. We quickly discovered that it was impossible to even get benchmark results in modern games with the RTX 2070 SUPER at 1440p. We had to drop to 1080p just so that we could come out with a comparison. Even at 1080p, the RTX 2070 SUPER was rarely playable with Ray Tracing, and when it was DLSS upscaling was required. The GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER allowed a 130-200% performance improvement in Ray Tracing performance. We definitely felt that the Ray Tracing performance upgrade, was larger, than the raster performance upgrade, though that was certainly big as well. We can tell the Ray Tracing architecture has evolved.
In terms of DLSS upscaling performance, we found that the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 4070 SUPER had close to the same “percentages” of performance uplift. However, this doesn’t tell the entire story. When you look at the actual amount of framerate improvement you got from DLSS upscaling, the RTX 4070 SUPER had much higher framerate counts. For example, in Horizon Forbidden West the 2070 SUPER improved framerates by 10FPS, but on the RTX 4070 SUPER the increase was 23FPS.
In Avatar, the 2070 SUPER improved by 15FPS, but the RTX 4070 SUPER improved by 38FPS. Starfield was just 8FPS on the 2070 SUPER, but it was 17FPS on the RTX 4070 SUPER. This shows that the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER has much larger gains in terms of actual framerate when using DLSS upscaling, so the benefit is much greater than that of the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER.
Final Points
There are some takeaways we find when comparing the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER to take note of. First, you will note that the power profile and power envelope is the same between both video cards. This means the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is providing 100%+ performance, at the same power, which is incredible, and shows the innovation and efficiency of the RTX 40 series.
Second, if you look back at the specifications of the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, you will find that the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is delivering higher specifications core counts, and VRAM, at the same price in today’s dollars. Upgrading from 8GB to 12GB is important in 2024 for a better gameplay experience. The needle has indeed moved upward from 2019.
Third, the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER will provide new features that the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER does not support, such as DLSS 3 Frame Generation. When all is said and done, if you are looking to upgrade from the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, this should give you an idea of what to expect.