It's weeks on from the launch of RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti and despite the lack of any games that utilise Nvidia's state-of-the-art ray tracing or DLSS features, the roll-out of the new Turing cards continues. The RTX 2070 has some pretty big shoes to fill, as the green team's xx70 cards are traditionally so compelling: the GTX 970 was one of the best price-vs-performance products of all-time, while the GTX 1070 may have been pricier, but delivered performance that inched ahead of the prior-gen Maxwell Titan. On the face of it, the RTX 2070's charms aren't so obvious, but it's still a good product and in time, I suspect it may well become a great one.
In essence, that's the key issue facing prospective buyers of Turing cards right now. Nvidia has taken a massive gamble in introducing radical new technologies that could change the face of gaming graphics and could radically improve performance - but it's so early that there are no real-life examples of these features in action. Based on everything we've seen, the signs look good, but it won't be until later in the year that Turing's headline features arrive in games like Battlefield 5, Hitman 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And in the here and now, without those features giving tangible results, the prices are an issue: the RTX 2070 is sold at what is essentially the same recommended retail price as the GTX 1080 and standard performance is - by and large - equivalent. But given the Turing feature set and the sheer potential there and the fact that performance is rarely lower than GTX 1080, I think the RTX 2070 is the card to have in that price range.
But first up, let's put the new Turing offering into context with its RTX siblings and the top-of-the-range Pascal offerings. For starters, the RTX 2070 bucks the trend in not being a cut-down version of its xx80 counterpart. Instead, it's based on a whole new chip, a fully enabled TU106. Effectively it offers around 78 per cent of the CUDA cores of the RTX 2080, and 75 per cent of the ray tracing power. However, the same eight gigs of GDDR6 memory are retained and it's operating on the same 256-bit bus for a prodigious 448GB/s of memory bandwidth. There's CUDA core deficit up against the GTX 1080, but Turing offers significantly improved efficiency per core and much improved caching - plus a big, big bandwidth advantage. It's going to be a fascinating contest here when the RTX 2070's closest equivalent Pascal offering has such a wide variation in specs.
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