Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070: rasterisation performance analysis

Rasterisation performance - essentially how fast non-RTX games run - has been a point of contention for the Turing line since launch. There's no doubting the stratospheric power offered by the RTX 2080 Ti, but it comes with a massive price-point attached. Meanwhile, the RTX 2080 - even with the small Founders Edition clock boost - offers broadly equivalent frame-rates to the outgoing GTX 1080 Ti, sometimes outperforming it, sometimes falling short. With that in mind, realistically, we should expect to see the RTX 2070 offer the same kind of relationship to the GTX 1080. To ensure equal standing with our existing RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti benchmarks, our RTX 2070 here is tuned to Founders Edition clocks which adds around three to four per cent to the tally. We have a page of benchmarks put aside elsewhere in this review that stacks up the 2070 at various performance levels against GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti, with some fascinating results.

All of our tests here are based on a single Intel-based PC test bed using a Z390-based motherboard and a Core i7 8700K, running with a 4.7GHz all-core turbo. The system also features 16GB of 3400MHz DDR4 and all titles are running from Crucial BX300 SSDs.

For mobile users of our site, our benchmarks will display as a simple table with frame-rate averages and the lowest one per cent (calculated by taking the highest frame-times and averaging them before converting into fps for easy readability). For desktop users, you get a deluxe benchmarking experience, where playing the YouTube video runs frame-time and frame-rate telemetry. The bar charts beneath are dynamically generated from the raw frame-times. Mouse over a particular card to see the performance differentials with the other and click on the bar chart itself to swap between frame-rate numbers and the arguably more useful percentage differences.

Assassin's Creed Unity

We kick off with one of our legacy titles that has the ability to blitz a GPU in terms of compute, bandwidth and VRAM allocation (not that the latter is much of an issue since all cards here have eight gigs of RAM minimum), while the bokeh depth of field effect proves extremely taxing in particular - especially on AMD hardware. Our RTX 2070 at Founders Edition clocks offers a modest six per cent lead over the GTX 1080, an advantage that would be reduced significantly on reference boards. The cutbacks on the TU106 processor are clearly significant - RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti are significantly ahead - 21 per cent and 49.5 per cent respectively at 1080p.

Battlefield 1

On this benchmark, the one per cent minimum scores can be skewed somewhat by random stutter incurred by shell impacts that vary from run to run, but broadly speaking, the averages and five per cent minimums speak for themselves. The RTX 2070 offers a decent slice of extra performance over the GTX 1080, and compared to Founders Edition clocks, the GTX 1080 Ti is only six per cent faster at 1440p resolution. With minimal tweaks, RTX 2070 could deliver a good 4K 60fps experience and even its one per cent minimum average at ultra HD is still north of 50fps. The Turing architecture seems to like the Frostbite engine.

Crysis 3

Similar to the RTX 2080 up against the similarly priced GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2070 offers static performance against its own last-gen equivalent, GTX 1080. We're running Crysis 3 here at its demanding very high preset, but average frame-rates in the 90fps area are highly creditable at 1440p - even delivering nicely on the the demanding lowest one per cent average, where the score remains north of 60 frames per second. Legacy titles like this can cause issues for new architectures and don't tend to receive much attention or optimisation, as you can see by Vega 64's off-pace performance here.

Far Cry Primal

Another legacy title here as we roll out the Dunia engine, tested across our 1440p and 4K champions. Once again, RTX 2070 offers a small lead here over GTX 1080 - an advantage that would disappear once the additional 90MHz of performance offered by the Founders Edition factory OC is removed. We'll be updating this benchmark in due course with its sequel, Far Cry 5, where we should expect a better showing from Vega 64 owing to the title's use of AMD's rapid-packed math(s) technology.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• DLSS - Deep Learning Super-Sampling: Performance Analysis
• Assassin's Creed Unity, Battlefield 1, Crysis 3, Far Cry Primal - Rasterisation Analysis Part 1 [This Page]
• Ghost Recon Wildlands, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3, Wolfenstein 2 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 2
• Which version to buy? Reference clocks vs Founders Edition vs Gaming-Z
• GeForce RTX 2070 - the Digital Foundry verdict