MSI GeForce RTX 2070 GAMING Z Performance Review @ [H]

sirmonkey1985 said:
lucky you.. mine died a terrible and slow death about 6 years ago..



cough in a special world it might but no the 1080ti still beats it for roughly the same price.

https://hardforum.com/threads/msi-g...performance-review-h.1969719/#post-1043883978
Click to expand...

I was going off the Ti being around 20% faster than the 1080, not 30% and double checked myself off this review. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1080_Ti_Gaming_X/30.html (16%, 21% and 23% at 1080, 1440 and 4K).

But regardless, a comparable Ti is around $750 right now so the 2070 is positioned pretty nice at $600. $150 ain't really worth it for a <10% increase. Even at 30%, that's $150 for a 13% increase. Still not worth it IMO at least.
 
Last edited:
Kyle:

I fail to see how you can award this card a gold rating considering just how much Nvidia is overcharging. Comparisons to AMD's Vega lineup should be unavailing because those are, plainly, not good cards that ended up badly priced due to costs of the large chips, HBM memory, and the interposer. It's like conveniently forgetting the Porsche options tax because you are comparing a Cayman to a Cadillac ELR.

In terms of pricing, the 2070 should be compared on an inter-generational basis to the previous two generations of mid range cards, the 1070 and the 970. The performance increases between the 970, the 1070, and the 2070 are in line with what we the customer base have long come to expect from a real change in the silicon die and memory upgrades rather than a tweaked refresh such as the GTX480 to 580 or what AMD has largely been doing for it's non-giant chips since the 7970, 290, and 480 were introduced.

Look at the launch prices for Nvidia's cards. The 970 launched at $329 and lying about the memory size aside, most people seemed to think the card was decent value for the money. The 1070, conversely, was launched at $449 for a "Founder's Edition" which largely set the scale for actual, real world, minimum pricing. People thought the $379 purported launch price was high and the $449, inclusive of the founder's premium, was verging on the obscene.

Now look at the 2070 with it's truly, disgustingly priced $599 figure. That is a $150 surcharge beyond the already over-priced launch of the 1070 at $449. Moreover, the argument that this is a "high performance" card falls flat because the X70 and XX70 cards from Nvidia have historically been midrange so the special carve out for X80 chips and "Titan" branded giant size chips cannot reasonably apply. The 1070 is a mid-level card and should have been $349 tops.

Even more so than what has been done with the 2080 and 2080ti, that Nvidia is able to charge so much for a midrange card is one of the most blatant examples of monopoly pricing I've seen in a long time.
 
Rizen said:
On the subject of Ray Tracing, buying the 2070 for that should be an obvious non-starter considering how awful the performance is on the flag-ship 2080 Ti.

I have no doubt that Ray Tracing will become much more prominent, but it's at least another generation away if not two.
Click to expand...

What was the last generation cycle time? From the 1070/1080 to 2070/2080? 2 1/2 years ago or so? Waiting for the next gen might be a bit long for some. I like to upgrade something every once in a while. CPU's have lasted longer. GPU's have had long upgrade cycles. I'm not hurting with either right now, but with the newer games supporting ray tracing and it doesn't look bad at all, I'd like to check it out. Bleeding edge and all that jazz.

As far as performance? Didn't BF5 have a couple weeks to get that out? I'm sure they will be getting better with performance and drivers and such in the near future. I feel it was rushed and they haven't really done any optimization on it yet.
 
Is this card actually over 12 inches in length? That is what the MSI page says.
 
This card is $200 too expensive for me to care. These cards remind me of when the Lexus LFA came out for almost $400k. Yeah, it was nice ride when you didn't consider price/performance (but not so nice when you realized that cars under $90k spank the LFA in a straight line and on a track).

Price/performance matters, sales will reflect that after the initial new release nerd surge.
 
Kyle,

was this review possible because Nvidia had a public driver with 2070 support? Would this have been possible to do with the 2080 with them requiring a secure login to download a launch driver?
 
Teenyman45 said:
At launch and for a long time thereafter, how many cards could easily be found for about $379? Instead, $449 more or less was the minimum price.
Click to expand...

The MSRP of the non-FE 1070 was $379, regardless if there was gouging/AIB-specific pricing gouging going on or not.


Screenshot_2018-10-15-11-40-04.jpg
 
Ur_Mom said:
What was the last generation cycle time? From the 1070/1080 to 2070/2080? 2 1/2 years ago or so? Waiting for the next gen might be a bit long for some. I like to upgrade something every once in a while. CPU's have lasted longer. GPU's have had long upgrade cycles. I'm not hurting with either right now, but with the newer games supporting ray tracing and it doesn't look bad at all, I'd like to check it out. Bleeding edge and all that jazz.

As far as performance? Didn't BF5 have a couple weeks to get that out? I'm sure they will be getting better with performance and drivers and such in the near future. I feel it was rushed and they haven't really done any optimization on it yet.
Click to expand...
The 2080 Ti struggles to maintain 60fps even at 1080p in the titles that have demonstrated ray-tracing effects, and the 2080 Ti is considerably more powerful than the 2070. Unless the implementation of these features is in their infancy and performance is improved immensely over time - which I doubt, given the long development cycle you mentioned between the 1000 series and the 2000 series - I don't think we are going to see acceptable performance at modern resolutions until the next generation.

Not too many people are spending $600-$1000 to play games at 45-60fps at 1080p.
 
"At 1440p though the money savings on a highly overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 may be preferred. It just isn’t fast enough to warrant the price difference of $100 for a 10-20% performance difference"

that's the main thing I wanted to know...good to get confirmation...as a ray-tracing card performance should be downright awful...as a 1070 owner the only real upgrade options are the 1080ti or 2080ti
 
This looks like the card to buy from this Nvidia generation. AMD will have to cut the price of the Vega 64 now to keep on selling it. All good for us consumers.
It would be interesting to see the performance difference between the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080 against their cost.
 
This is a brilliant move by Kyle, and I hope MSI doesnt get blamed by Nvidia for the early review. Keep up the good work and stay [H]ard!
 
Rizen said:
So you're banking on big performance improvements over time based on one game released in 2006? Good luck.
Click to expand...

No, I was only giving an example of a really badly implemented PhysX game.
I don't think they ever fixed the issue with exceptionally poor performance when PhysX was enabled in that game.

After that, PhysX was bought out by nVidia and it became part of the graphics compute, rather than a true physics processor.

You wouldn't even notice the PhysX in games these days, as they seem to be implemented in subtle ways.
 
One one side, I am fairly pleased with the 2070 performance, slightly more than the 1080 and offers a few more features (even if they are not utilized yet). But on the other side, the pricing is atrocious. Years later after the 1080 was released, essentially offering the same tier of performance for the same price. The 2070 should be a $400-450 product at most.

I would have considered upgrading my son's 1070 to the 2070 if the pricing was in line with where it should be, but alas I won't. For now, Nvidia can take home my coveted "Middle Finger" award and spin on it until they offer a more compelling product for their asking price.
 
Nvidia still needs to cut the price an additional $100 if they want this card to be the 'best bang for buck' RTX card
 
[H]ard just nut shot nVidia, love it!

Keep up the great work gents, looking forward to the 2080 Ti review.
 
Update: MSI has contacted us today asking HardOCP to remove this RTX 2070 review, even though MSI had nothing to do with sourcing this review. NVIDIA's green feathers are apparently flying over this RTX 2070 review being published before its embargo date and time that is has with reviewers that signed its NDA. This is how things turn out when NVIDIA tries to force 5 year blanket NDAs down journalists throats. We chose not to sign NVIDIA's NDA. Our review is 100% legitimate and we are not going to remove it because NVIDIA is throwing a fit over it being published. The fact of the matter is that NVIDIA changed its entire NDA/Product Embargo structure after we reported on GPP this year. It did this to muzzle stories about NVIDIA in the future, and it is on NVIDIA for tying that to its product reviews. It is sad that MSI is having to deal with the brunt of NVIDIA's fury over this, and to that, we are sorry that is happening. This review could have easily been over any other AIB's card, it just so happens that an MSI card was the first one that we could source.
 
Fuck MSI and Nvidia. You shouldn't be bound by an NDA you didn't sign. Having the guts to do things your way in spite of pressure is why I donate via Patreon to [H] and why I trust them.

That aside this looks like a great upper mid range card.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
lucky you.. mine died a terrible and slow death about 6 years ago..
Click to expand...

Mine actually did die. Turns out there's 3 resistors in the power supply that are a known weak point. Soldered in 3 new ones and good to go :) this is the most common failure by far for these old things.
 
I doubt MSI will do anything against Kyle and [H]... The card was purchased retail overseas... It's not like MSI gave them the card and said, "You play nice until Tues. at 8am..."
 
Wow....this is fucking classic. Pissed at Kyle for buying the card and posting a review. They should be mad at the seller overseas who sold it early. Not Kyle's fault he was smart to buy it early and post a review about. This could of been ANYONE that did the same thing who did not sign the NDA.
 
I did get a chuckle at the "overseas source", as I've heard there are B&M shops here in the states that have 2070s in stock but not shelved quite yet.

Not saying Kyle lied about where he got the card, but if I got the card from a friend at a local B&M, I'd say it was sourced from overseas as well.
 
Brackle said:
Wow....this is fucking classic. Pissed at Kyle for buying the card and posting a review. They should be mad at the seller overseas who sold it early. Not Kyle's fault he was smart to buy it early and post a review about. This could of been ANYONE that did the same thing who did not sign the NDA.
Click to expand...

yeah that new nvidia NDA was disheartening to read, glad [H] stuck to their own principles
 
DejaWiz said:
GTX 970 - $329
GTX 1070 - $379
RTX 2070 - $599

Smokin' crack lately, nVidia?

Thanks for putting in the time and effort for another amazing review, [H]!
Click to expand...

fellas these are just founders prices

msrp will definitely be lower.... not that you'll ever get one at msrp.
 
Great review Kyle, I was expecting the 2070 to perform near the 1080 but please to know the 2070 is in-between the 1080 and 1080TI, not agreeing with the pricing of the product (think it should be 50 bucks less), but do understand where it stands against other products in the pack.

Also, glad you are being yourself and still ruffle feathers out of almost every brand you reviewed, the salty response from them are pretty entertaining.
 
myaccountbroke said:
To me this seems like it should be priced at no more than $429. I first assumed that this is a sign that desktop gaming is leaving me behind; but now I am thinking this is a pricing blunder on nvidia's part. Instead of getting two sales of people buying new 2070's and 2080ti's, they are getting one and encouraging the rest to buy used:
  • second hand 1080's are available for $360
  • second hand 1080ti's are available for $560
Click to expand...

With this logic, all new cars would be priced at used car prices so that they would fit into that pricing framework. But then wouldn't used car prices just drop and create some sort of wormhole?

I totally get buying something used because it makes more sense for YOU, but expecting manufacturers to build that logic into their pricing doesn't make sense.
 
Last edited:
Great review.

I have to say, especially after reading this, I don’t understand why NVIDIA insists on an NDA. It’s not as if this was a flop of a launch and the card is crap. They have kept their foot on the gas despite AMD’s apparent complete lack of response, and the only thing you can argue here as a negative is price, but that’s also a result of no real competition.

Now if only G-Sync weren’t stupidly expensive vs Freesync....
 
HockeyJon said:
Great review.

I have to say, especially after reading this, I don’t understand why NVIDIA insists on an NDA. It’s not as if this was a flop of a launch and the card is crap. They have kept their foot on the gas despite AMD’s apparent complete lack of response, and the only thing you can argue here as a negative is price, but that’s also a result of no real competition.

Now if only G-Sync weren’t stupidly expensive vs Freesync....
Click to expand...


Looking at the price, I would say it was indeed a launch flop
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top