Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 Super and GeForce RTX 2070 Super hit the streets today, capping off a monumental week for graphics card releases.
Reviews of the new RTX Super duo actually went live a week ago as Nvidia angled to kneecap the hotly anticipated launch of AMD’s 7nm “Navi” GPUs on July 7. Nvidia wasn’t screwing around either; the RTX Super cards effectively shifted performance down a pricing tier, with the $399 RTX 2060 Super delivering frame rates on par with the original $500 RTX 2070, and the $500 RTX 2070 Super nearly matching the powerful $700 RTX 2080.
Both RTX Super cards earned glowing reviews and our Editors’ Choice award for moving the price-to-performance bar so much. They’re great.
Not great enough to deliver a fatal blow to AMD, though. AMD cut launch pricing in response, and the now-$350 Radeon RX 5700 and $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT beat their identically priced rivals—the GeForce RTX 2060 and 2060 Super, respectively—in pure performance. In some games, the Radeon RX 5700 XT equals the RTX 2070 Super’s performance for $100 less, and AMD’s shift to the 7nm manufacturing process and an all-new “RDNA” graphics architecture eliminated Nvidia’s once-gargantuan power efficiency advantage.
They’re great, too.
NvidiaBut only Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards contain dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing and AI-enhanced tasks. Ray tracing’s been slow gaining traction over its first year, but several major gaming franchises announced support plans at E3 2019, and soon Battlefield, Tomb Raider, Call of Duty, Doom, Wolfenstein, Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs, and even Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will embrace the hybrid rendering technology.
The GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 Super bump up the ray tracing capabilities versus their non-Super namesakes, and Nvidia is tossing in free copies of Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood—two very hyped games with ray tracing support—with each Super purchase.
While we reviewed the Founders Edition version of the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super, you’ll find a wide variety of customized models available at etailers like Newegg, though most of those are already out of stock despite costing more than Nvidia’s own boards.
Brad Chacos/IDGThis isn’t the end of the Super rollout. The $800 GeForce RTX 2080 is slated to release on July 23, delivering much more performance than the non-Super original—though not as much performance as the beastly RTX 2080 Ti, which remains at the top of Nvidia’s ray tracing stack. Here’s how the overhauled GeForce RTX 20-series will look by the end of the month, after the RTX 2080 Super hits stores and the original RTX 2070 and 2080 get phased out:
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti—$999 (but really $1,100+)
- GeForce RTX 2080 Super—$699
- GeForce RTX 2070 Super—$499
- GeForce RTX 2060 Super—$399
- GeForce RTX 2060—$349
The Super cards don’t affect Nvidia’s more affordable GTX 16-series graphics card lineup, which lacks the dedicated ray tracing and AI hardware found in RTX GPUs.