Introduction

NVIDIA today refreshed its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card lineup with the new "Super" RTX 20-series. The RTX 20-series graphics cards have already been in the market for over eight months, and AMD is finally addressing the performance segment with its 7 nm PCIe Gen 4 Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series. AMD claims that the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT are faster than the GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 respectively, so NVIDIA decided to upscale the two SKUs with new models. We hence have the new GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super, which will be available in stores starting on the 9th of July. The new models will sit at the same price points as the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, and the existing cards will drop slightly in price. The two will be joined by the high-end GeForce RTX 2080 Super later this month, on the 23rd.

The new RTX 2070 Super is a whole different beast from the original RTX 2070, which had maxed out the "TU106" silicon. NVIDIA is having to tap into its larger sibling, the 12 nm "TU104". This is the same chip on which the RTX 2080 and upcoming RTX 2080 Super are based. The RTX 2070 Super is endowed with 2,560 CUDA cores, 40 RT cores, and 320 Tensor cores. The memory subsystem is unchanged, with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit interface ticking at 14 Gbps (448 GB/s). The GPU clock speeds have been increased to 1605 MHz base and 1770 MHz boost, compared to 1410 MHz base and 1620 MHz boost of the original RTX 2070. Being based on the "TU104" has another perk—NVLink support enabling 2-way SLI. The lack of multi-GPU capability was one of the major criticisms of the RTX 2070, especially since some of the custom-design cards are sold for upward of $600.



NVIDIA is targeting the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 XT with the RTX 2070 Super. However, at $499, it comes at a $50 premium over the disclosed $449 MSRP of the RX 5700 XT. NVIDIA is also allowing its add-in card (AIC) partners to release custom-design graphics cards based on this chip, which will begin rolling out later this month. Today, only reviews of the Founders Edition are allowed.


As we stated earlier, NVIDIA has carved out the RTX 2070 Super from the "TU104" silicon by disabling four TPCs or eight SMs (streaming multiprocessors). Four TPCs also happens to make up a GPC (graphics processing cluster) on the "TU104". We don't know whether an entire GPC is disabled to achieve the SM count of 40 or one TPC is disabled across four GPCs (a more optimal way to do this). The RTX 2070 Super ends up with a CUDA core count of 2,560, an RT core count of 40, a Tensor core count of 320, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs.

In this review, we take the RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition card for a spin. This card looks similar to the RTX 2080 Founders Edition since it's based on the same silicon and reference PCB. A chrome top-plate with green "Super" badging next to "RTX 2070" and another badge on the back-plate are all that set this card apart. As with its original RTX 20-series cards, the Founders Edition cards by NVIDIA don't tick at reference clock speeds. This card has an overclocked GPU Boost frequency of 1770 MHz.