Supercharging Turing? RTX Goes SUPER! – NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER & RTX 2060 SUPER Review

Final Thoughts

When I first saw the SUPER tease, I honestly was not sure what to think. Let’s face reality for a second, Nvidia has their hands in so many different areas and so many different levels of tech, that Gaming graphics while I would love to believe we are the core focus, it is merely a grain of sand on the beach of core tech Nvidia works on. Especially when you get into the pro level products such as dedicated offload cards, Quadro/Tesla, etc. then you have things like neural network components and even autonomous driving platforms. Then we have their deep dive into  ML/DL data sciences and future AI tech which will change the way we view computation and design future technologies.

Now to the cards at hand, while I’m sure Nvidia had these chips already sorted as parts to fill the gaps and to extend the life cycle of Turing based GPUs. Similar to when we see Ti models of cards such as the 1070 Ti crop up deep into the Pascal life cycle.

Nvidia saw a potential threat to its lower/midrange RTX enabled cards with the announcement of NAVI and in order to ensure they stave off any gaps being filled by Radeon based parts, Nvidia made a major play with a price/performance combo that will be tough to beat. Nvidia knew the performance level they had to combat via AMD’s claims from their announcement and demos. Now begs the question,  is SUPER the right part to stave off the new Radeon parts releasing in just a few days? Stay tuned and I’m sure there will be some comparison numbers very soon.

For the Nvidia RTX SUPER series of cards, they deliver performance and overclocking that we have come to expect from Nvidia RTX models. They also brought about a more favorable price/performance ratio that will likely attract some of the hold outs since RTX first launched.

Heres the score breakdown

Value – 90 The RTX SUPER series cards bring some much-needed price reductions to the RTX series, especially since Nvidia has been lambasted for the prices since the initial introduction. In essence, the cards all leveled up a bit to a state of almost replacing the next card up the tier, and at a lower cost of entry.

Performance – 95 Performance is always relative. It really comes down to what you are doing with the product. With the RTX SUPER Nvidia took a solid aim at the claimed performance of NAVI and put models in place that could likely take the wind out of AMDs sails before they even come to market.

Innovation – 85 Innovation, I have to look at critically as note needs to be taken that with these cards, in particular, there was not a lot done to break new ground here. I am not trying to be cynical but these are literally just additional cores and memory for a 2060 and using a lower core enabled TU104 from a 2080 to make the 2070 SUPER. With this being considered I think 85 is fair as its still a high score honoring what RTX has enabled for gamers, but nothing really new for the super cards, as they are existing parts just re-imagined to fit different spots in the stack.

Quality – 95 Quality is something I am also very critical about. And while some may call quality the materials, fit and finish, etc. I look at all aspects of quality including support, software and experience by end users as that will really define the quality of a product. The RTX SUPER cards much like the RTX cards from before it are all very good quality both on the PCB level along with component choices. also, having game ready drivers at day of launch for critical titles is a great thing and shows Nvidia’s dedication to the gamers even if some of the bigger HPC and data center clients may pay their bills far more than gaming ever could.

Nvidia brought out super and I can’t help but be reminiscent of the old Dikembe Mutombo commercial for Geico where he repeatedly blocks anything someone tosses yelling ‘NOT IN MY HOUSE’  Nvidia is Mutombo swatting away every time AMD tries to get a foothold in the market. Yea I know a strange parallel to draw, but its me.

Nvidia set out with a goal with Super and they delivered excellent performance, at an even better value and all the RTX goodies that come with it.

Stay tuned this is likely to become a wild ride through the coming months.