I’ve had a lot of requests to compare laptops with the Nvidia RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 graphics,
so that’s exactly what we’re going to do here! We’ll find out which performs better,
how much difference there is, and help you decide which is better value for the price.
Let’s take a look at how the laptop RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 differ in terms of specs,
note that things like clock speed can vary between different laptops based on other factors
such as cooling.
The GTX 1070 has more Cuda cores, higher base and boost clock speeds, and also a higher
TDP. The 1070 also has 8GB of GDDR5 memory, while the 2060 has 6GB of GDDR6, so less total
size but the 2060 memory is faster.
I’m going to be showing results from four different laptops instead of two, so two laptops
with RTX 2060 graphics, and two laptops with GTX 1070 graphics. If you’ve seen my other
laptop videos, you’ll know the Intel i7-8750H CPU is a hot one, and if we’re not hitting
thermal throttling we’re reaching power limit throttling instead. This means each
laptop can perform differently based on the CPU, so to try and reduce this issue I’ve
used double the data compared to usual and taken the averages, which should in theory
be more accurate.
To try and reduce this further I’m only looking at second highest graphics settings,
as lower settings are more CPU bound, so higher settings allow us to better see the differences
between graphics. These are also settings most people would actually be playing with
with this level of hardware anyway, and I’ll also note that the 1070 results were from
a few months ago, as I haven’t got one available for updated testing.
Let’s start out with Far Cry 5, which was tested with the built in benchmark using high
settings. In all upcoming graphs I’ve got the GTX 1070 results in the top bar, and the
RTX 2060 results shown by the bottom bar. We can see that in this game, the GTX 1070
is coming out ahead, with 5% higher average FPS when compared with the 2060. There’s
a much larger change to the 1% low however, where the GTX 1070 was almost 13% ahead of
the RTX 2060 here.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark at high settings. While not exactly
graphically intensive, it’s a game that myself and others have found to get a nice
performance boost from Nvidia’s new turing architecture. As a result, the RTX 2060 is
getting 4.6% higher average FPS when compared with the GTX 1070, and a larger 9% improvement
was seen to 1% low results. Out of all 12 games tested, this was the largest improvement
I saw with the RTX 2060 graphics.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark with very high settings
in use. There was only a small improvement with the GTX 1070 here, coming out 1.2% ahead
in average FPS when compared against the RTX 2060, or more simply put just 1 FPS ahead,
margin of error territory realistically.
Fortnite was tested using the replay feature at high settings, and again we can see the
GTX 1070 was performing better here. This game actually saw the largest improvement
between the two out of all 12 games tested, with a 9.7% increase to average frame rate
with the GTX 1070, while the 1% low saw just a 3% improvement over the RTX 2060.
DOOM was tested using vulkan with high settings, and the GTX 1070 was once more ahead of the
RTX 2060 in this game. In terms of average FPS the 1070 was 8.4% ahead of the 2060, while
the 1% low difference was closer together, with the 1070 6% ahead here. Realistically
this difference, like in most games, isn’t really enough to even be noticeable, this
game was still running very well on either option.
Overwatch was tested in the practice range, as it allows me to perform the exact same
test run rather than with bots or other players which will always vary. In this test the GTX
1070 was 9.5% ahead of the RTX 2060, making it the game with the second best performance
on the 1070 out of all 12 games tested. In terms of 1% low the 1070 was a bit further
ahead now, scoring 10.5% above the 2060. Like other games however, both are still able to
hit above 200 FPS with ultra settings, so it honestly doesn’t really make a difference
here.
Dota 2 was tested using the replay feature, so this test performed the exact same task.
I take the average of 3 runs, so each result is made of 6 total results, 3 from the two
2060 laptops and another 3 from each of the two 1070 laptops. We can see there’s basically
no difference in terms of average FPS, the 2060 was slightly ahead, but as this is a
more CPU demanding game I don’t think we’re seeing a difference in graphics here. This
is just an example that some games are more CPU bound, so that graphics differences don’t
really matter.
Shadow of War was tested using the built in benchmark with very high settings, and this
was another of the few games tested that seemed to prefer the RTX graphics, at least with
the laptops I was testing with. In this test the RTX 2060 was 3.7% ahead of the GTX 1070
in terms of average FPS.
I’ve also had to test some older games with the 2060, like Battlefield 1, as Battlefield
5 didn’t exist when I last had a 1070 laptop for testing just a few months back. In this
game with high settings in use the GTX 1070 was able to achieve 3% higher average FPS
when compared with the RTX 2060, while there was a larger 7.6% improvement to 1% low with
the 1070.
Watch Dogs 2 was tested as a fairly resource intensive game. At 1080p with very high settings
the GTX 1070 graphics were just 2% higher in terms of average frame rate, while the
1% low results were even closer together, with a slight edge towards the RTX 2060. Either
way both options are capable of above 60 FPS averages in this game, so both play it just
fine.
Ghost Recon was another resource intensive game that was tested with the built in benchmark
using very high settings. The average FPS from the GTX 1070 was 3% higher than the RTX
2060, however there was a larger difference in 1% low performance noted, where the 1070
was 14% higher, indicating that the 1070 has less dips in performance in this particular
test.
The Witcher 3 was tested with high settings and hairworks disabled. The average frame
rates of both graphics were very close together, however the RTX 2060 was just over 1 FPS better
in my tests. The 1% low on the other hand was a different story, with a much larger
11% improvement seen with the GTX 1070 graphics.
I’ve also tested with some synthetic benchmarks, including Unigine’s Heaven, Valley, and
Superposition, as well as 3DMark’s Time Spy, Fire Strike and VRMark. The RTX 2060
is shown by the purple bars while the GTX 1070 is shown by the red bars, and in most
of these tests the GTX 1070 was ahead of the RTX 2060 graphics.
In terms of improvement, over these 12 games tested on average the GTX 1070 was performing
just 2.65% faster when compared with the RTX 2060 in terms of average frame rate. The amount
of performance gain or loss depends on the game, but in general there was a small performance
improvement with the GTX 1070 graphics. The difference doesn’t seem to be that significant,
honestly I think when it comes down to it you could go either way when buying a laptop,
GTX 1070 or RTX 2060 should deliver similar performance overall.
Don’t forget these are just laptop results, it’s a different story when we look at desktop
PC graphics, where I found the 2060 coming out 13% ahead of the 1070 at 1080p, 15% ahead
at 1440p, and 16% ahead at 4K, check the card in the top right corner if you want to see
the full results.
Now let’s discuss overclocking. I only have data for one game across all 4 laptops when
it comes to overclocking, Far Cry 5. I’ve got the stock results in purple as before,
but the overclocked results are in red. It’s worth noting that the boost to performance
isn’t a result of just overclocking the graphics, I also undervolted the CPUs for
best performance, though if anything that will help reduce CPU throttling issues and
better showcase GPU performance. With that in mind, I actually got the exact same for
1% low and then only around a frame per second better with the 1070, so again the 1070 was
only just slightly ahead of the 2060, 1.3% faster in this case.
I’ve also got the clock speeds from running the Heaven benchmark, both at stock and while
overclocked. I wasn’t sure how to best graph the data, but basically each colour represents
a different laptop, so both red bars are the same laptop with 2060 graphics, while the
purple bars are the second 2060 laptop, and blue and green show the two different 1070
laptops. We can see that overall, the 1070’s are achieving higher clock speeds, and while
this will depend on factors such as cooling which will differ between laptops, this matches
the specs shown at the start of the video, where the 1070 was listed with higher speeds.
In terms of percentage improvements, both the GTX 1070 and RTX 2060 were able to get
about 7% higher clock speeds while overclocked.
Unfortunately I’m unable to compare temperatures and power draw at this time. As I used completely
different laptops from different companies the cooling solutions are different and can’t
accurately be compared against each other. As for power draw I simply didn’t measure
this with the 1070 laptops when I had them.
Now for the final difference, the price, you can check the links in the description for
up to date laptop prices with either graphics card, as prices will change over time. This
will depend on where you live, but in general it seems like GTX 1070 models are cheaper.
In the US on Newegg for instance, this ASUS Scar II with 2060 is $1800 USD, while they’ve
also got a 1070 version for $1500, granted this is with a current sale, but it’s still
possible to get more performance for less money. Another example is the same laptops
on Amazon, the RTX version costs $100 more, while the GTX version is on sale, granted
the RTX one does also have a larger SSD. Here in Australia the MSI GE63 with RTX 2060 goes
for $2900 AUD, while the GTX 1070 model is $200 AUD less, or about $130 USD less minus
our taxes, so in general it does seem like the older GTX 1070 models can be picked up
for less money while offering slightly better performance in most games.
So which graphics card would you pick in your next laptop? The older but slightly better
overall GTX 1070, or newer but slightly behind RTX 2060? Of course you’ve got the option
of using Nvidia’s new ray tracing features with the 2060, but from what I’ve seen so
far these aren’t that exciting with the 2060 as it’s the lowest card in the RTX
lineup. With the games we’ve currently got, more power seems to be needed to run that
half decently, so at the moment I wouldn’t buy the 2060 with RTX in mind.
In terms of raw gaming performance the 1070 was ahead in the majority of the games tested,
but as we saw, on average it really doesn’t matter too much, I’d pick whichever was
cheapest at the time in your region. The 1070 may be better going forward, given it has
more memory, that could be useful later on making it pull out further ahead of the 2060,
while in theory the 2060 is more likely to get driver updates that improve performance
compared to the older 1070, it really is a close battle.
Let me know which graphics you’d pick down in the comments, and get subscribed for more
upcoming GTX and RTX laptop comparisons, there are going to be quite a few on the way.