RTX 2070 is slightly faster than GTX 1080

RTX 2070 is slightly faster than GTX 1080

As exciting as the new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards were when Nvidia first debuted them, no one was under the impression that they would be the cards that the majority of gamers would buy. Typically the more mid-range cards are far more popular because they are priced at a more reasonable level. That goes doubly so for the new Nvidia cards which came in an order of magnitude more costly at launch than their predecessors.

The RTX 2070 isn't likely to be the most popular card in the world when it debuts with a price tag of between $500 and $600, but it will offer decent performance if some newly leaked benchmarks are anything to go by. Spotted by Twitter user Tum Apisak, the results were from the 3DMark Time Spy test and show a "generic" Zotac VGA card, but the way it lines up with results from the 2080 Ti and 2080, suggests that it is the result of a benchmarked 2070.

It managed 8,151 points in Time Spy when paired up with an Intel Core i7 8700K, around 1,100 points less than the 2080, and 2,700 less than the 2080 Ti. For comparison, WCCFTech highlights that this is a little bit more powerful than the GTX 1080 is capable of, which is the sort of generational leap you tend to see from new ranges of GPUs. Tomorrow's mid-range is yesterday's top of the line.

What's a little concerning about these benchmarks though, is it's quite possible this RTX 2070 was overclocked. It had a rated boost clock of 1,950 MHz, which is a couple of hundred megahertz higher than the rated clock speed of the Nvidia Founders Edition. If that's the case, the 2070 might be less capable than the 1080 at stock speeds.

Considering a 1080 can be had for under $500 now, the RTX series looks incresingly like a costly upgrade for not a whole lot of improvement.