Today, Nvidia announced the highly-anticipated refresh of the GeForce RTX line of GPUs, called the RTX GeForce Super. The new series, which includes the RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super, and RTX 2080 Super, enjoys enhanced performance over their non-super counterparts, but at an identical price (apart from the RTX 2060 Super).
Although you’ll need to check out our review coverage to have a firm idea of how well these cards perform, the specification table for these new cards tells most of the story.
Considering that the 2070 and 2080 models of the Super line are no more expensive than their non-Super equivalents, the spec comparisons show a clear advantage to the Super series in terms of general gaming capabilities and raw floating point performance. At the top of the heap is the impressive RTX 2080 Super, which closes the gap with the far more capable RTX 2080 Ti, although it remains a firm 2080 plus, rather than a 2080 Ti minus.
The RTX 2070 Super blows the RTX 2070 out of the water and could be the new killer card in the RTX lineup. The RTX Super 2070 improves on clock speed and CUDA cores over its standard 2070 counterpart, making it a very attractive proposition at the $500 point in the market.
The RTX 2060 Super arguably receives the biggest upgrade, with a sizable bump to its CUDA core count, and a huge increase in memory bandwidth, thanks to its increase to 8GB of GDDR6. That’s why its price has leapt $50 too, but it helps expand the line up, whereas the Super RTX 2070 and 2080 cards will replace their non-super counterparts in the coming months.
The RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2070 Super will both launch at the same price as their original predecessors, at $699 and $499, respectively. The RTX 2060 Super, on the other hand, will debut at a slight price hike, costing $399 compared with its precursor’s $349.
This may be justified in light of the fact that the RTX 2060 Super will feature 8GB of memory instead of the 6GB of memory of the original RTX 2060 (along with the previously mentioned memory bus increase). It’s a considerable boost in speed, particularly in the case of the RTX 2070 Super over the RTX 2070, without the increase in cost that rumors suggested. Gamers looking to make an upgrade will likely find the upper echelons of this new series quite appealing, especially compared to the fairly lackluster response to the RTX series launch in 2018.
In our limited time with these cards so far, we ran the hardware on our test system in 3DMark Time Spy. The 2060 Super landed 11% behind the 2070 Super, but the RTX 2080 was still 6% faster than the 2070 Super. The more interesting comparison was between the RTX 2060 Super and the AMD’s current fastest GPU, the Radeon VII. The results were neck and neck, which could spell trouble for AMD, though that depends on how its new crop of Navi cards perform. That’s only one benchmark, of course, and we’ll have more to report on performance as we continue testing.
Besides the improved specs on display in the RTX Super series, Nvidia seems intent on heavily pushing ray tracing with this latest release. Ray tracing is a realistic graphics rendering technique which more faithfully reproduces the effects of light and shadows. In spite of its slick visuals, it has largely not caught on in the gaming community due to lack of available titles so far. This may explain why Nvidia waited until after E3 wrapped up to introduce the series instead of crashing the trade conference as some speculated that it would. By waiting for the the next wave of video games to be unveiled, Nvidia can now point to those and position itself as the best hardware option for delivering the full experience of those games. Indeed, Nvidia’s press materials open with shots of banners teasing E3’s splashiest new titles.
But Nvidia is not relying solely on hype to sell gamers on ray tracing. As part of the RTX Super launch, Nvidia is offering a bundle that includes a copy of ray tracing-ready games Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood with every purchase of any graphics card or PC that includes an RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super, or RTX 2080 Super. This promotion may be just the incentive hesitant gamers need to get on board with ray tracing and drive adoption.
Interestingly, Nvidia did not announce a price cut for the current RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080. The Buy at Amazon still sits at the top of the pack in terms of power and price, while the others will naturally drop in price as they get phased out of production.
Both the RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super will be available for purchase on July 9, while the RTX 2080 Super launches later this month on July 23. All cards announced are Founders Edition, with plans for launches from third-party manufacturers coming in the near future.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.