Nvidia RTX 2070 is launching on October 17

Nvidia RTX 2070 is launching on October 17

There's no denying that the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti graphics cards are powerful, but their price to performance ratio isn't that attractive. At much higher launch prices than the last-generation and comparable prices to top-tier Pascal cards like the 1080 Ti, they aren't the easiest to recommend. The RTX 2070 on the other hand, could be. Set to be priced at $500 for the standard version and $600 for the Founders Edition, that new range of mid-tier GPUs is set to debut on October 17.

The RTX 2070 is built on the same 12nm process as the larger two GPUs, but its core is known as the TU106. Its die is slightly smaller than the RTX 2080 and it contains just 10.6 billion transistors, compared to the 13.6 and 18.6 billion that the 2080 and 2080 Ti have, respectively.

It does have the same amount of GDDR6 memory as the 2080 -- 8GB -- and it operates at the same speed and has the same 256-bit memory interface. Elsewhere though its specs are quite different. It has 2,304 CUDA cores, around 600 less than the 2080, and 144 TMUs, with 64ROPs, again, around two thirds that of the 2080.

The base clock speed for the standard version comes in at 1,410MHz, while the boost clock hits 1,620 MHZ. The Founders Edition card will overclock that to 1,710MHz, if you want to pay for the privilege.

All of this equates to 7.5 TFLOPS of power, 2.6 less than the 2080 and just under half that of the 2080 Ti. Its power draw is noticeably lower though, hitting 175W for the standard edition when at peak load.

Set to go on sale on October 17, the cards will start at $500 and work their way up from there.