Nvidia RTX 2070 GPU release date, rumours, and performance

The Nvidia RTX 2070 was announced alongside its high-end RTX 2080 brethren at Gamescom in August, but we’ve got to wait until October 17 to get our hands on the mainstream Turing GPU. I guess you could make do with the monstrous RTX 2080 Ti… y’know, with your BIG pockets and oversized wallets.

But if you want to harness ray tracing to augment your gaming, such as shadows and lighting, but don’t have a bathtub full of money lying around to spend on a graphics card, the RTX 2070 is likely the minimum requirement for real-time ray tracing in this generation.

It seems unlikely at this point that Nvidia will fit the 2060, 2050 Ti, or 2050 GPUs with ray tracing RT Cores. The minimum performance for solid ray tracing in games is roughly 5-6 Giga Rays per second, with the Nvidia Turing-powered RTX 2070 just hitting the 6 Giga Rays per second mark, if a cheaper GPU were to release with fewer RT cores than the RTX 2070, the performance just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Equally, the volume mainstream segment is incredibly price sensitive, and might not be able to stomach the premium of extra RT Core silicon.

That leaves the RTX 2070 as the king of entry-level RTX. But, if ray tracing isn’t your thing, there’s still a whole heap of performance available in traditional graphical workloads to look forward to. If all goes to plan, the RTX 2070 should be a pretty powerful 4K graphics card.

VITAL STATS

Nvidia RTX 2070 release date
The RTX 2070 release date has now been officially announced – the third-tier Turing card will launch on October 17. The RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti both launched on September 20, though with general Ti availability a week later.

Nvidia RTX 2070 specs
The straight RTX 2070 is set to have 2,304 CUDA cores alongside 8GB GDDR6. That’s just 22% shy of CUDA count of the RTX 2080.

Nvidia RTX 2070 price
The pricing for the RTX 2070 is $499 (£469), although the Nvidia Founder’s Edition will start at $599 (£569).

Nvidia RTX 2070 performance
The RTX 2070 will offer 6 Giga Rays/s of real-time ray tracing performance, and we can expect it to perform quite a bit better than the GTX 1070 in traditional gaming workloads – potentially upward of 35-50%.

 

 

NVIDIA RTX 2070 RELEASE DATE

Nvidia confirmed at the Gamescom RTX Editor’s Day event that the RTX 2070 was going to release in October,and has now announced, via Twitter, that it is going to be making the third-tier Turing card, the GeForce RTX 2070 available on October 17. That’s a little less than a month after the green team’s RTX 2080.

Beautiful any way you look at it.

The GeForce RTX 2070 will be available on October 17th. #GraphicsReinvented

Shop starting at $499 ($599 Founders Edition) → https://t.co/ammFWibyFypic.twitter.com/IsScoXm5rZ

— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) September 25, 2018

 

NVIDIA RTX 2070 SPECS

The RTX 2070 will feature a more modest CUDA core count of 2,304 compared with the 2,944 cores packed into the TU104 silicon of the RTX 2080. That means the SM count has been cut from the RTX 2080’s 23 down to 18.

That’s slightly less of a cut than when Nvidia took the knife to the GP104 GPU shared by both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The upcoming RTX 2070 has less than 22% fewer cores inside it than the RTX 2080 while the chip inside the GTX 1070 was a full 25% weaker than its larger GTX 1080 sibling. Even if Nvidia drops the pace of the GDDR6 memory array on the RTX 1070, it’s still going to have some juice behind it.

But, some of our sources hiding in the shadows suggest each of Nvidia’s Turing graphics cards will be reportedly rocking an entirely bespoke GPU design. The Turing TU106 chip, which recently appeared on the HWiNFO patch notes, could then be headed for the RTX 2070, rather than a potential mid-range 2060.

In terms of its memory layout, the RTX 2070 will arrive with the same 8GB GDDR6 VRAM as the RTX 2080, running along an aggregated 256-bit memory bus. With the memory running at 14Gbps, it will have some serious bandwidth to play with.

With potential gaming performance 8% higher than the GTX 1080 being bandied around, the RTX 2070 could be a tasty GPU.

NVIDIA RTX 2070 PRICE

While pre-orders aren’t yet live for the RTX 2070, we do have a price. The RTX 2070 will cost a rather eye-watering $499 (£469). In other words, the same price as the GTX 1080 was adjusted to once the GTX 1080 Ti launched.

Nvidia’s factory overclocked Founder’s Edition will, once again, come at a premium over the reference cards. The Founder’s Edition RTX 2070 will cost $599 (£569).

NVIDIA RTX 2070 PERFORMANCE

There have been little in the way of performance figures for Nvidia’s mid-range RTX 2070 graphics card, however, we aren’t entirely empty-handed heading into the launch week for the new graphics card.

The RTX 2070 has shown up in Ashes of the Singularity, a benchmark often favoured by the red team, and shows moderate improvements of around 10% over the GTX 1080 from the Pascal generation. While this is a pretty impressive performance boost by generation, the price tag of the GTX 1080 has not only been met, but surpassed by the RTX 2070 Founders Edition at $599, so it’s not exactly a clear win for gamers in terms of raw performance.

If reference cards rocking stock clocks do make it out to the market at the base price of $499, however, the price difference won’t be quite so difficult to parse.

These might not be the final performance figures either, although we are getting close to the RTX 2070’s launch date of October 17. This is when we will get our hands on full benchmarks for the entry-level ray tracing graphics card.

While we have only a few figures to speculate on, we do have the numbers for the RTX 2080. Our benchmarks put this top-end card at anywhere from 20% to 42% above the GTX 1080 in gaming. That’s with a 15% increase in CUDA core count.

The RTX 2070 reportedly features a 20% increase in CUDA core count over the Pascal generation GTX 1070, at 2,304 to 1,920 respectively. That means we could see similar, if not greater, performance uplift from Pascal to Turing between these cards – although the RTX 2070 does come at a premium.

It’s a very different Nvidia launch than we’ve previously seen, with the ultra-enthusiast cards coming out at the very beginning of a generation. And maybe that’s because Nvidia doesn’t really see a lot of challenge in the high-end space, with the AMD Navi GPU generation only likely to try and compete at the mainstream level, and Intel around two years awayfrom getting anything that will even function as a discrete graphics card.