Conclusion

Just as we said in our RTX 2060 Super review, the primary advice we can give you right now is to wait and see how Navi affects this segment of the market come Sunday. These two cards are designed to compete directly with the upcoming AMD hardware, and it wouldn’t surprise us if there’s some jostling for position once AMD fully reveals its hand, and this should be good news for consumers.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT is set to come in for $449 (UK price TBC), which undercuts this card by $50. It should win on pricing, then, but performance and efficiency remain to be seen, and you can of course expect Nvidia to play up heavily the ray tracing element, which is fair enough. Nvidia will also be quicker to market with third-party designs – a week from today, in fact.

For Nvidia fans that have had their eye on some high-end RTX hardware but have been put off by the high pricing, the sudden ability to hit RTX 2080 performance levels (or near enough) with a saving of nearly £200 and a bit of time spent overclocking can only be good news. Unless, of course, you happened to have bought the RTX 2080 recently… On that note, this launch risks Nvidia delivering a bit of a gut punch to any customers that did just that; if it can so readily drop pricing to meet AMD, could it not have been a bit lower to begin with?

RTX 2070 Super also makes the Radeon VII look even more overpriced, offering equivalent performance (actually slightly better) for £100 less; that 16GB HBM2 buffer might bring a small advantage to AMD at 4K, but it certainly inflates the cost a great deal.

There is an argument to be made that RTX 2070 Super only looks like good value because we only have poor-value hardware against which to compare it e.g. RTX 2080 and Radeon VII. This is a fair point; it’s obvious this performance price drop has only occurred as a result of Navi’s impending launch. There’s certainly something to be said for competition, eh?

One thing we can’t fault Nvidia on is the Founders Edition design. The combination of a solid design, three-year warranty, and effective cooler is a tempting one, especially as these cards will be coming in at reference pricing.

The RTX 2070 Super will qualify for Nvidia’s latest games bundle, namely free copies of both Wolfenstein: Youngblood (late July release) and Control (late August release), both of which will feature ray tracing. On that note, ray tracing is finally trickling into new releases, but it’s still slow going. Still, being able to hardware-accelerate this technique is an advantage Nvidia looks like it will hold over AMD for some time, and you can bet a lot of money that it’ll keep reminding us and you of that fact, which is fair. Whether Navi’s presence in the next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles that sport Navi GPU cores brings AMD any advantage in this field in the coming years remains to be seen, but for now Nvidia holds the upper hand here.

The RTX 2080 always seemed like the worst card of the RTX family, not quite able to deliver 4K gaming like the flagship part and not really offering enough advantage over RTX 2070 to be worth the inflated asking price. With today’s launch, this level of performance suddenly becomes realistic – still only for a lucky few, but certainly more than before. The RTX 2060 Super is still better value, as this card is 25 percent more expensive but only 17 percent faster on average, but that’s nowhere near as bad as the situation was between RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 was, and being sub-£500 will put it within many more budgets.

Like RTX 2060 Super, there’s enough value in RTX 2070 Super right now to make recommending it as the go-to sub-£500 card an easy choice. However, with Navi right around the corner, it would be unwise to jump the gun right now... Sunday can’t come soon enough!