NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q

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.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q Design is a mobile graphics card for laptops that is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1660 Ti for laptops (depending on the cooling capabilities). According to the specifications, the Max-Q variant clocks 22% slower for the base speed and 16% for the boost speed.

Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1660Ti integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. The performance is similar to the old GTX 1070 (Max-Q) but at a reduced TGP of 60 Watt (versus 80 of the laptop version 115 Watt of the desktop version). 

In April 2020 Nvidia refreshed the GTX 1660 Ti with the new codename N18E-G0-A1 with similar specs and pin compatible to the refreshed RTX chips (e.g., RTX 2070 Super Mobile).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 60 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) and therefore 20 Watts lower than a normal (Max-P) 1660Ti for laptops. Therefore, the Max-Q variant is well suited for thin and light gaming laptops. The TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.