NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 OpenCL, CUDA, TensorFlow GPU Compute Benchmarks

Here are the first of our benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card that launched this week. In our inaugural Ubuntu Linux benchmarking with the GeForce RTX 2070 is a look at the OpenCL / CUDA GPU computing performance including with TensorFlow and various models being tested on the GPU. The benchmarks are compared to an assortment of available graphics cards and also include metrics for power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar.

The GeForce RTX 2070 as a reminder has 2,304 CUDA cores, 1410MHz base clock speed, 1620MHz boost clock speed, and with its RTX technology is capable of 42T RTX-OPS and 6 Giga Rays/s. The memory with the RTX 2070 is 8GB of GDDR6 and provides a memory bandwidth of 448GB/s.

There are around 10.8 billion transistors on the RTX 2070's TU106 GPU core compared to 18.6 billion with the RTX 2080 Ti TU102. While the RTX 2070 is significantly cut-down compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, its price is much lower: while the RTX 2080 Ti flagship card commands a price of $1,199+ (or $799+ for the RTX 2080), the RTX 2070 launch price is at $449 USD or $599 USD for the NVIDIA Founder's Edition card.

Like the RTX 2080 series, the RTX 2070 features RT cores for ray-tracing, Tensor cores, DisplayPort 1.4a, and other features in common with the Turing architecture.

As NVIDIA didn't send out RTX 2080 Founder's Edition review samples and most NVIDIA AIB partners not interested in the (admittedly small) Linux gaming population, I ended up having to buy an RTX 2070 for Linux testing. The retail graphics card I ended up purchasing for the Linux RTX 2070 testing was the EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC GAMING (08G-P4-2172-KR). I went with this card simply as it was the cheapest (and closest to reference) model available on launch day. While the RTX 2070 cards are slated to start at $499 USD, this was the cheapest model I could find in stock and came in at $549 USD (or $608 for the fastest shipping and tax).

The RTX 2070 has a 175 Watt TDP and requires 6-pin and 8-pin PCI Express power connections.

The EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC GAMING matches the 1710MHz boost clock speed of the Founder's Edition card and is aligned with the rest of the RTX 2070 specifications. The RTX 2070 XC GAMING features a dual fan cooler, which EVGA dubs iCX2 cooling and features an EVGA RGB logo.

EVGA only lists Windows 7 and Windows 10 as the supported operating systems for their GeForce RTX 2070 on their web-site but on the product packaging they do also mention Linux.