Preview: The NVIDIA RTX Super Series

Last week, NVIDIA shook up the PC gaming world once again with the announcement of its brand new line of graphics cards – the RTX SUPER series. Due to hit shelves a mere nine months after the launch of the massively successful Geforce 20-series, the RTX SUPER GPUs arrive boasting high performance, sleek design, and low cost. In this article, I will discuss what sets the SUPER cards apart from the rest of the field.

You might be wondering what kind of performance boost a RTX SUPER graphics card will give you vs a regular RTX GPU. The answer, in short, is a big boost. Referencing the chart below depicting some recent scores from FurMark tests we ran, let’s take a look at the performance between the RTX 2060 SUPER and the original RTX 2060.

The RTX 2060 SUPER is an upgrade over the RTX 2060 in seemingly every specification category including processing cores (2,176 vs 1,920), base clock (1,470 MHz vs 1,365 MHz), video memory (8GB vs 6GB), memory interface (256-bit vs 192-bit), and more. In fact, the RTX 2060 SUPER shares many similarities performance/spec-wise with the original RTX 2070 and scores closely. Similarly, the RTX 2070 SUPER is on par (slightly lower performance) with the original RTX 2080. In addition to the performance boost, the SUPER GPUs all run NVIDIA’s Turing architecture which means that they’ll all be capable or real-time ray tracing and support other advanced gaming features like NVIDIA adaptive shading, mesh shading, deep learning super sampling, and more.

While the RTX 2080 Ti still reigns king over the growing field of PC gaming GPUs, the RTX SUPER series cards serve to fill in the gaps between the current tiers of performance. If you’re looking to get a little more out of your current GPU, upgrading to a SUPER series graphics card could provide you with a significant boost.

When AMD announced its new NAVI 5700 GPUs, it seemed like they were in a real position to secure the low-mid level pricing tier of graphics cards. Within days, NVIDIA announced the pricing for the RTX SUPER cards and all of a sudden, AMD was worried. In fact, the pricing on these new SUPER GPUs was so competitive for the performance that AMD had to lower the prices on their new NAVI cards. So what will it cost you to get your hands on one of the new SUPER cards?

Available July 9th, pricing for the RTX 2060 SUPER starts at $399.99 (vs $349.99 for the regular 2060), and the RTX 2070 SUPER starts at $499.99. Later in the month on July 23rd, the RTX 2080 SUPER will be available starting at $699.99. That means that you can get a RTX 2070 SUPER and a RTX 2080 SUPER for the same price as their regular RTX counterparts!

So how do the NVIDIA SUPER cards compare to the AMD RX 5700 cards? We already discussed price (and the fact that AMD had to lower their pricing to compete NVIDIA’s own aggressive pricing model) in which AMD has a slight edge over NVIDIA, but is the performance worth the price?

Taking a look back at the graph of FurMark scores we referenced earlier, we can see that the RX 5700 outperforms the 2060, and that for the same price of $399.99, the RX 5700 XT outperforms the RTX 2060 SUPER. So if you’re looking for a card in that $300-$400 range, the AMD cards are very nice pickups if your looking to buy or finance a graphics card with solid performance. However, if you take a the leap and spend that extra $100, the RTX 2070 SUPER provides a significant performance leap over both AMD cards. If we go to the RTX 2080 SUPER tier, none of the other cards even come close.

In conclusion, the NVIDIA RTX SUPER series cards package considerable PC gaming performance at a reasonable cost. If you’re one of our members who recently leased a RTX 2060, 2070, or 2080 – don’t worry – we’ll have the SUPERS soon and you can always upgrade at any time!