GeForce RTX 2070 Shown Outpacing GeForce GTX 1080 In Early Benchmark Leak
NVIDIA's hardware partners are starting to announce custom cooled versions of the company's GeForce RTX 2070, and soon enough websites will start posting performance reviews. In the meantime, we're left to speculate about performance based on the specs, and whatever leaks there might be. As it pertains to the latter, there is a leaked 3DMark benchmark run that suggests the GeForce RTX 2070 will be faster than the GeForce RTX 1080.
For anyone who has not been following the GeForce RTX launch, NVIDIA announced three new cards built around its Turing GPU architecture: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GeForce RTX 2080, and GeForce RTX 2070. All three feature dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing, or more precisely, to enable a hybrid model of traditional rasterization rendering bolstered by real-time ray tracing on parts of a scene.
Developers are still working on rolling out support for Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, which is the crutch to NVIDIA's RTX technology, so we don't have a full picture of performance. However, we do have benchmarks of the two higher end SKUs that show how they compared to previous generation Pascal cards in fully rasterized games.
This has drawn a mixed response. The new cards are certainly faster, but they're also much more expensive, as part of the pricing premium takes into account the advanced features that RTX brings to the table. What's potentially appealing about the GeForce RTX 2070 is that it's the least expensive card in the lineup, starting at $499 for reference models and $599 for the Founders Edition (probably custom cooled variants).
How does it perform, though? Frequent leaker TUM APISAK posted a screenshot on Twitter showing a 3DMark Time score for the GeForce RTX 2070. It's listed as a Zotac model in a system running a Core i7-8700K processor clocked at 3.7GHz. It scored 8,151 points, versus 9,266 for a GeForce RTX 2080 in the same test bed, and 10,850 for a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
We don't know if the score is real, but based on the other two GPUs, it doesn't seem out of the ordinary, based on the hardware. A GeForce GTX 1080 paired with a Core i7-8700K scores around 7,500 points in Time Spy, so there's your unofficial performance comparison to Pascal.
That's not a huge gap in performance, but it is a higher score, and that's comparing with a lower model number in the previous generation. Pricing throws a wrinkle into things, though, as the GeForce GTX 1080 sells for around the same price as a reference GeForce RTX 2070.
Anyway, we don't want read too much into this. It's a single benchmark, and leaked one at that. Reviews of the GeForce RTX 2070 will start appearing soon, so stay tuned.
