This was supposed to be AMD’s moment – the time when Navi finally arrived to make Team Red competitive again towards the higher end of the graphics hardware market. Just days before the launch of the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT though, Nvidia fired a new salvo: three ‘tweener’ cards designed to take the wind out of AMD’s sails by offering superior performance at a dangerously similar price. In fact, the firm was confident in its new line-up that it even pulled its embargo – so products that many see as a reaction to AMD’s Navi will actually be reviewed ahead of their prospective competition.
As Nvidia teased back in May, three cards form the Super line-up: the RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super. The 2080 Super is still waiting in the wings, but we’ve tested the first two members of the family and as you’ll see from the numbers, they’re pretty impressive.
Compared to their vanilla counterparts, the Super series cards are improved in almost every way. The new GPUs offer a greater number of CUDA cores, higher base clocks and even improved hardware-accelerated ray tracing abilities. However, these higher-clocked components do draw more power; a little more in the case of the 2060 Super and a lot more for the 2070 Super. The RTX 2060 Super also sports 8GB of VRAM, compared to the 6GB of its predecessor – a good addition bearing in mind that ray tracing in particular can push memory hard. Altogether, it’s an impressive package that perhaps suggests Nvidia built in some headroom with their first-generation Turing cards.
Final pricing has been confirmed: it’s £379/$399/€419 for the RTX 2060 Super, which sees a price bump over the vanilla card and £479/$499/€529 for the RTX 2070 Super, which is what Nvidia are currently asking for the original 2070 Founders Edition card. When we consider AMD’s pricing for its new Navi graphics cards – $379 for the Radeon 5700 and $449 for the Radeon 5700 XT – it’s clear that both companies have a decent offering, but AMD won’t be able to gazump the original RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 cards as planned. Based on AMD’s own benchmarks up against the older RTX cards, we should expect both RTX 2060 Super and its 2070S equivalent to match or beat Navi based on rasterisation performance alone, before we factor in the attraction of features like ray tracing, variable rate shading and DLSS. As usual though, wait for reviews and benchmarks before drawing any firm conclusions on the upcoming Navi vs Turing dust-up.