In fact, if you run Battlefield V in DirectX 11,
even AMD’s much cheaper Radeon
RX 5700 beats the RTX 2060 Super.
The new AMD GPUs might not have
hardware ray tracing, but they’re
seriously fast at rasterisation tasks.
Where the RTX 2060 Super
really impressed us, however, is
with its power efficiency. At peak
GPU load, our system only drew
248W from the mains, compared to
295W for the Radeon RX 5700 XT. Also, the
coolers on both the Founders Edition and the Zotac
Mini card are massively quieter than the noisy blower
coolers on AMD’s latest cards. The Zotac’s fans do audibly
spin up when the GPU is running at full pelt, but at least the
noise isn’t irritating.
Meanwhile, the RTX 2070 Super is the new sub-£
king. We tested the Palit card at both its overclocked
speed, and the Nvidia stock speed, to gauge performance.
With the exception of Battlefield V in DX11 mode, the
RTX 2070 Super tops all the performance charts in our
tests. It’s brilliant for gaming at 2,560 x 1,440, never
dropping below 60fps in any of our 2,560 x 1,440 non-
ray-traced tests. It can even handle a bit of 4K gaming if
you’re happy for your frame rate to drop down to the mid-
30s. It can even handle Battlefield V with High DXR at 4K
with this level of frame rate.
The boost on the Palit card also gives it a few extra
frames per second here and there, pushing the Battlefield
V minimum up to 59fps at 2,560 x 1,440 with High DXR.
Like the Zotac card, the Palit Game Rock card did get
noticeably noisy under load, although the noise is
nowhere near as irritating as the racket from AMD’s
blower coolers. It’s not particularly power-frugal, though,
with our system drawing 324W from the mains with the
Palit card installed.
Overclocking
Finally, we wanted to see if we could eke even more
performance out of the RTX Super cards, and found that
there’s some room for manoeuvring here. In particular,
there’s plenty of headroom to overclock the memory. The
Zotac card was happy to have an extra 1GHz (effective) added
to the memory clock, while the Palit card could have another
800MHz (effective) added to the memory frequency.
There was some room to push up the GPU clock speed
too – we could add another 50MHz to the Palit’s already
overclocked 1830MHz boost clock, and another 120MHz to
the Zotac GPU’s boost clock. These tweaks gave us a bit
more performance, with the Zotac card now hitting a 60fps
minimum in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 2,560 x 1,440 (a
4fps boost), and the Palit card’s minimum rising from 70fps
to 73fps in the same game.
BEN HARDWIDGES P E C
PALIT GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER
GAME ROCK
Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super, 1605MHz
base clock, 1830MHz boost clock
Pipeline 2,560 stream processors, 64 ROPs
RT cores 40
Tensor cores 320
Memory 8GB GDDR6, 14GHz effective
Memory interface 256-bit
Bandwidth 448GB/sec
Outputs/inputs 3 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2b, 1 x USB Type-C
VirtualLink, 2-way NVLink
Power connections 2 x 8-pin
Card width 210mmS P E C
ZOTAC GEFORCE RTX 2060
SUPER MINI
Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super, 1470MHz
base clock, 1650MHz boost clock
Pipeline 2,176 stream processors, 64 ROPs
RT cores 37
Tensor cores 272
Memory 8GB GDDR6, 14GHz effective
Memory interface 256-bit
Bandwidth 448GB/sec
Outputs/inputs 3 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2b
Power connections 1 x 8-pin
Card width 210mm