CheckMag | Ages like fine wine - How good is the mobile RTX 2070 in 2024?

Turing was and is an outlier in that barely anyone talks about it. In retrospect, the most affordable Turing cards weren’t all that better than the GTX 1050 Ti whereas the RTX 3060 Ti had no difficulty making high-end Turing offerings redundant, irrelevant one could say. It's all water under the bridge now, however, there is still some merit to the RTX pioneers, especially as far as laptops are concerned.

The desktop RTX 2070 was destined to find itself in very much the same position that today's RTX 4070 finds itself in. It lost its shine rather quickly; the Super cards would steal the spotlight and the presence of strong AMD cards did not make things any easier for the poor 2070, either. GeForce RTX 3000 cards that were in the making already would come and finish it without mercy.

It was a lot different with laptops. I should know, considering I got myself an MSI GE65 packing an RTX 2070 back in the day. In the mobile segment, the laptop RTX 2070 occupied the same strong 1080p and acceptable 1440p performance niche that the desktop RTX 2070 did - one that became dated the second 9th-generation consoles and games hit the shelves. Still, the mobile RTX 2070, being based on the same chip that the desktop card but with clock speeds reduced somewhat, was spared the fate of getting outclassed to the point of irrelevancy due to two factors. One, upcoming GeForce RTX 3000 laptop graphics cards would prove to be a far cry from what Nvidia had in store for the desktop world. The RTX 3070 Laptop was based on a heavily cut-down die from its desktop counterpart leading to a rather modest performance uplift over the mobile 2070, and the RTX 3060 Laptop fared even worse, especially considering that it had to be content with 6 GB of VRAM as opposed to the 12 GB that the desktop RTX 3060 was available with. Two, there was no competition from the Radeon side at the time. As a result, Nvidia’s upper mid-range Turing card got to enjoy a longer life than many of its sisters.

It should be noted that by 2024 standards, all cards listed above deliver entry-level performance, the RTX 2070 included. Their VRAM buffer is getting increasingly tight, their RT cores are too slow for most games, and their raster performance falling behind the PS5 and Xbox Series X just makes the hole even deeper. But DLSS support is a huge advantage of this GPU meaning it can still handle extreme graphics quality settings with some healthy amount of grace. The desktop GTX 970 is pushed beyond its limit with mid-40s fps in Cyberpunk 2077; the desktop GTX 1070 can’t reach 60 fps in Plague Tale: Requiem and yet, with my RTX 2070 Laptop I can push settings up to medium-high and still hit 60 fps in Alan Wake 2 thanks to a bit of AI upscaling magic.

A lot of conversations about upscaling nowadays are full of negativity. But we shouldn’t forget how much of a difference AI upscaling can make when it comes to giving aging GPUs like the 2070 another lease of life. For laptops, where the only way to upgrade usually involves buying a newer model, and also in certain parts of the planet where PC components can be priced very unfairly, the real-world benefits of using the technology crush drawbacks such as minor upscaling artifacts.