NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop)

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with Max-Q design is the power saving variant of the mobile RTX 2070 graphics card with reduced clock speeds and power consumption. Therefore, it is suitable for thin gaming laptops. It is based on the same TU106 chip with 2,304 shaders and 8 GB GDDR6 memory connected by a 256 bit interface (12 GHz).

Currently it looks like there will be two variants, a low power 80 Watt variant with 885 - 1185 MHz core clock and a faster 90 Watt variant with 1080 - 1305 MHz core clock). Both clock the memory at 6 GHz versus 7 GHz of the normal RTX 2070 (115 Watt TDP).

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1080 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU106 chip on a 12 nm FinFET process and includes features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT), which should combine to create more realistic lighting effects than older GPUs based on the company's Pascal architecture (if the games supports it). The RTX 20870 is also DisplayPort 1.4 ready, while there is also support for HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and H.265 video en/decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

Performance

The Max-Q version of the RTX 2070 should perform a bit slower than the mobile RTX 2070. Therefore, it should be able to run all demanding games in 2560x1440 with maximum details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.