NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super vs AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT: Which is the Best GPU for 1440p Gaming?

AMD’s Navi architecture marks the company’s return to the performance segment after a brief hiatus that resulted from the departure of prominent figures at RTG such Raja Koduri and others. Based on the gaming-centric RDNA architecture, the Radeon RX 5700 series cards are aimed at 1440p gaming, offering high frame rates across the majority of modern titles.

NVIDIA, however, hasn’t been sitting idle either. The RTX Supers come with beefed up ray-tracing chops and better raster performance more or less on par with the Navi cards albeit at a premium. On one hand, you’ve got cheaper 1440p graphics cards offering consistent performance and on the other, you’ve got a higher price tag but as well as some add ons like RTX and DLSS. However, there is a big price gulf of about 7K. So, what will it be? We’ll help you decide.

GeForce RTX 2070 Super vs Radeon RX 5700 XT: Specifications

Traditionally AMD GPUs have been superior when it comes to hardware but due to relatively poor utilization and driver support (or lack thereof) haven’t been able to wholly leverage it. With AMD’s RDNA architecture, things are changing. Gaming is the primary focus (unlike GCN which was more compute-oriented). Although that’s not a bad thing, games mainly benefit from lower latencies, higher IPC and faster core clocks. This is exactly what the Navi cards offer. As you can see, the specs of the two competitors are almost the same. The only notable difference is with respect to the Texture Mapping Units and the Boost Clock behavior.

Test Bed:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• Motherboard: ASRock X570 Taichi
• RAM: 16GB Trident Z Royal @ 3600MHz
• PSU: Corsair HX1000i
• HDD: WD Black 4TB
• All the games were tested at the ultra quality preset at 1440p using the DX12 API. Deux Ex was tested at the high quality preset

GeForce RTX 2070 Super vs Radeon RX 5700 XT: 1440p Gaming Benchmarks

On average, the Radeon RX 5700 XT is less than 10% slower than the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. However, it does manage to come out on top in certain titles like Metro Exodus and World War Z which favour Radeon hardware. You’re basically paying another 6K or so for an additional ~10% performance.

Conclusion

Frankly speaking, both cards are viable options. You can’t go wrong with either. If you aiming for a 1440p or 1080p display, I’d suggest sticking to the RS 5700 XT, especially if you’re not interested in trying out the first wave of RTX enabled titles. For 4K, the 2070 S is the better choice due to better overclocking capabilities and higher bandwidth.