The number “eight” has typically denoted a top-of-the-line Nvidia card, and that was the case with the recently released RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti too. Top cards are great, but also very costly.

Often much of the performance can be had from more mainstream cards, in Nvidia’s case those with a six or a seven in their titles. Well, let’s check out the RTX 2070, the mainstream alternative to the RTX 2080.

Nvidia RTX 2070

What are you getting with the RTX 2070? 

Importantly, the RTX 2070 promises to include all the ray tracing features of the 2080 series. Yes, the Turing chips are capable of far higher performance than the previous generation of Nvidia GPUs, but it is the ray-tracing cores that really sets these chips apart.

Signs are that the 2060 and 2050 chips won’t have the ray tracing RT cores so if you’re looking for a mainstream GPU with real-time ray tracing capabilities the RTX 2070 or RTX 2070 Ti might be your only option.

It is a good option nonetheless, as the RTX 2070 manages to hit the 6 Giga Rays per second mark which is essential for making real-time ray tracing in games a possibility. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the RTX 2070 has the GPU brawns to enable 4K gaming at solid detail levels across a lot of titles.

RTX 2070 Tech Specs

RTX 2070 Quick Specs

It’s worth checking out how the RTX 2070 compares to other Nvidia chips in terms of technical specifications. First, the new RTX range has a lot more memory bandwidth. Even though 1070 and 1080-based cards came with the same 8GB of GDDR RAM, the bandwidth available was restricted to GDDR5 levels: 8Gbps for 1070 cards and 10Gbps for 1080 cards.

The RTX 2070, just like the RTX 2080, brings along GDDR6-based memory which means you get 14Gbps in memory bandwidth, which is a useful increase. With 144 cores and 2,304 stream processors, the RTX 2070 appears to be on a worse footing than 1070 and 1080 chips, but it simply uses its GPU prowess more effectively – resulting in higher overall performance. However, the 2070 has 20% more CUDA cores compared to the 1070, which is a definite step ahead.

And compared to the 2080? You have 20% fewer stream processors, 144 texture units instead of 184 and 288 tensor cores instead of 368. There’s also a dip down from 46 RT cores to 36 RT cores. You may also be disappointed to know that you can’t SLI RTX 2070 cards.

Should I buy one?

RTX 2070 aftermarket

 

An RTX 2070 will be a more affordable entry into real-time ray-tracing compared to RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti cards. Is it suitable for you? It depends on how important you find in-game ray-tracing, and to be honest we’re not sure how ray-tracing will turn out yet as supporting titles are thin on the ground. Nonetheless, you should be able to play most games at 4K pretty well with this card and enjoy real-time ray-tracing once it’s more widely available.