Faced with the challenge by AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi, which promises higher performance than the GeForce RTX 2070, NVIDIA was looking for a way to strengthen their lead in the performance segment as quickly as possible without building a new graphics processor, which takes a lot of time and money. Their answer is the GeForce RTX "Super" lineup, which is comparable to the "Ti" models the company released in the past. NVIDIA probably chose to go with the new brand extension "Super" instead of "Ti" for consistency's sake because they didn't want to attach "Ti" to the 2060 and 2070 only to be left with nothing for the 2080 (there already is a 2080 Ti). They probably also had to combat the "7 nm and PCIe gen 4" messaging by AMD that may lead consumers to believe that Navi is a generation ahead of Turing.

Technically, the new GeForce RTX 2070 Super is built around the GeForce RTX 2080, not the GeForce RTX 2070. The underlying reason is that the GeForce RTX 2070 already uses the full TU106 chip, which means enabling more shaders on that chip isn't possible. The RTX 2080, on the other hand, has a lot of margin for cutting down on shader count, which also helps with harvesting because GPUs sometimes have silicon defects during manufacturing which make certain shaders unusable. Instead of trashing those GPUs, NVIDIA can now use them on the RTX 2070 Super, which helps tremendously with cost. Another cost improvement is that the full RTX 2080 PCB is used: same VRM, same board design, which means no new R&D cost and economies of scale. We did spot a few minor differences in components, though, which suggests the PCB is a newer revision—so the RTX 2070 Super is not just a down-binned RTX 2080.

Results from our new graphics card test suite with all the latest games and a new Core i9-9900K paired with an EVGA Z390 DARK motherboard show a solid 14% performance improvement over the RTX 2070. Last generation's flagship, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, is 2% slower, so the RTX 2070 Super can be considered to deliver equal performance. AMD's fastest, the Radeon VII, is 3% behind, and we expect the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT to be around 10% slower than the RTX 2070 Super, too. The next step up is the GeForce RTX 2080, which is 7% faster—not that much, especially when you consider the price difference. With those performance numbers, we can recommend the RTX 2070 Super for highest detail gaming at 1440p.

Power efficiency of Turing is amazing as you all know, and the RTX 2070 Super is no exception. Its RTX 2080 legacy makes the card more power efficient than the RTX 2070, but slightly worse than the RTX 2080. Just like most other Turing cards, the RTX 2070 Super will run at its power limit all the time during gaming, which does make overclocking a bit more complicated, too. Our data (for all Turing GPUs) suggests that NVIDIA is using this method to run their cards at the maximum power efficiency point—good for noise and temperatures.

Gaming noise levels are good with only 33 dBA, which is merely 1 dBA more than the RTX 2070, yet the RTX 2070 Super offers considerably better performance. Unfortunately, the card does not run as quietly as we want in idle, and it also does not include the highly popular idle-fan-stop feature, but NVIDIA's board partners will certainly address that with their custom design variants.

Overclocking worked well and reached clocks similar to other RTX 2080 cards; the same goes for memory. Overall, after manual overclocking, we gained 8.4% in real-life performance, which makes the card faster than even the RTX 2080.

The RTX 2080 DNA in the RTX 2070 Super means the card comes with support for SLI. However, the technology isn't really making any progress, and game support is lacking tremendously, so I don't think the addition of this feature is very relevant except for a very limited crowd of gamers. We're all still waiting for widespread multi-GPU DirectX 12 in games, which would make SLI and CrossFire obsolete as well because it works with all cards, even if they don't support multi-GPU technologies themselves.

Releasing on July 9th, but priced at $500, the RTX 2070 Super is not cheap. It comes at exactly the same price point as the RTX 2070, but with more performance, so price/performance effectively does go up. We reached out to NVIDIA about whether the MSRP of the RTX 2070 non-Super will go down now, and they let us know that they haven't made any changes to the RTX 2070 MSRP, but naturally, its price will go down, following the changed market conditions. In order to sweeten the deal, NVIDIA will include a two-game bundle with all RTX Super cards consisting of Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Control. Both titles come with support for NVIDIA RTX raytracing to show off the capabilities of their new technology. The new RTX Super lineup will definitely turn up the heat on AMD pricing their RX 5700 XT at $450 (for now). The RX 5700 XT will definitely not be able to match RTX 2070 Super performance, and we're having doubts about whether thermals or noise will end up being comparable, which could make the $50 price increase to the Super very justifiable for potential customers, or force AMD to reduce their pricing.