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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh: Review and Analysis for 2025

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh is an updated version of the popular mobile graphics card designed to balance performance and energy efficiency. In 2025, it remains relevant for gamers and professionals who value mobility without compromises. This article will explore its architecture, performance, and features.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Turing Architecture: Optimization for Mobile Systems

The RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh is based on the Turing architecture but has received several enhancements as part of the "Refresh." The chips are manufactured using an 8nm process (compared to 12nm in the original model), which has reduced power consumption and increased clock speeds.

Unique Technologies

- RTX (Ray Tracing): Hardware support for ray tracing thanks to 36 RT cores.

- DLSS 3.5: Artificial intelligence to boost FPS and detail in games.

- NVIDIA Reflex: Reduction of latency in esports titles.

- FidelityFX Super Resolution support: Compatibility with AMD's open technologies for flexible settings.

2. Memory: Speed and Efficiency

GDDR6: The Optimal Choice

The card is equipped with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory featuring a 256-bit bus. The bandwidth is 448 GB/s, which is sufficient for gaming at 1440p and working on demanding projects.

Impact on Performance

The memory capacity allows for running modern games with Ultra textures (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty or Starfield) without data loading from an SSD. However, in 4K with RTX enabled, limitations may arise due to the "only" 8 GB.

3. Gaming Performance

FPS in Popular Titles (Average Values, DLSS Enabled)

- 1080p Ultra:

- Apex Legends — 144 FPS.

- The Witcher 4 — 78 FPS (RTX Medium).

- 1440p High:

- Call of Duty: Warzone 3 — 95 FPS.

- Horizon Forbidden West PC Edition — 68 FPS (RTX High).

- 4K Medium:

- Fortnite — 55 FPS (DLSS Balanced + RTX).

Ray Tracing: The Cost for Realism

Enabling RTX reduces FPS by 25-40%, but DLSS 3.5 compensates for the losses. For instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p:

- Without RTX/DLSS — 62 FPS.

- With RTX Ultra + DLSS — 58 FPS.

4. Professional Tasks

Video Editing and 3D Rendering

Thanks to 2304 CUDA cores, the card handles:

- Rendering in Blender (about 15% faster than the RTX 3060 Mobile).

- Encoding 4K video in DaVinci Resolve (30% acceleration using NVENC).

Scientific Computing

Support for CUDA and OpenCL makes it suitable for machine learning (TensorFlow) and simulations. However, for complex tasks (e.g., neural networks with billions of parameters), it's better to choose the RTX 3080 Ti or professional series cards.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP and Cooling Recommendations

- TDP: 90 W (10% more efficient than the original Max Q).

- Temperatures: Up to 78°C under load in well-ventilated laptops (e.g., ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15).

Recommendation: Choose models with a vapor chamber and fans with anti-vibration mounts. Avoid ultra-thin cases — they may throttle under sustained loads.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6700M

- Pros of AMD: 12 GB GDDR6, better performance in 4K without RTX.

- Cons: Weaker ray tracing performance, no equivalent to DLSS 3.5.

Intel Arc A770M

- Pros of Intel: Good price ($450), AV1 support.

- Cons: Drivers still unstable in older projects.

Conclusion: The RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh outperforms competitors in the balance of RTX performance and AI technologies.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply

For laptops with this card, a PSU of at least 180 W is required. When upgrading a PC with an external GPU (via Thunderbolt 4), use a power supply of 500 W or more.

Compatibility

- Platforms: Works with any CPU (Intel 13th Gen, AMD Ryzen 7000).

- Drivers: Update via GeForce Experience — 2025 versions are optimized for Windows 12.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Ideal for gaming at 1440p with RTX.

- Support for DLSS 3.5 and Reflex.

- Energy-efficient for laptops.

Cons:

- 8 GB of memory can be a bottleneck in 4K and professional tasks.

- Price: $600-700 (new systems), which is higher than the Intel Arc A770M.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Should Consider the RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh?

This graphics card is a choice for:

- Gamers who want to play with ray tracing on a laptop without bulky cooling.

- Designers and editors who value mobility and sufficient power for rendering.

- Students balancing academics and hobbies.

In 2025, the RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh remains relevant, but if your budget allows, consider the RTX 4070 Mobile with 12 GB of memory. However, for its price, it offers an excellent balance, especially in the secondary market (but remember: we only consider new devices!).

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

March 2020

Model Name

GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

Generation

GeForce 20 Mobile

Base Clock

900MHz

Boost Clock

1125MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

10,800 million

RT Cores

Tensor Cores

Tensor Cores are specialized processing units designed specifically for deep learning, providing higher training and inference performance compared to FP32 training. They enable rapid computations in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and personalized recommendations. The two most notable applications of Tensor Cores are DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AI Denoiser for noise reduction.

288

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

144

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

12 nm

Architecture

Turing

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

8GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1375MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

352.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

72.00 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

162.0 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

10.37 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

162.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

5.288 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

2304

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

4MB

TDP

115W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

CUDA

7.5

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

5.288 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Score

6879

Blender

Score

2062

OctaneBench

Score

181

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon Pro WX 7130 Mobile

5.613 +6.1%

GeForce GTX 780 Ti 6 GB

5.452 +3.1%

GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

5.288

Radeon RX 580 2048SP

5.154 -2.5%

Radeon RX 5500 XT

5.092 -3.7%

3DMark Time Spy

GeForce RTX 4060

10778 +56.7%

GeForce RTX 3060 GA104

8719 +26.7%

GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

6879

Radeon Pro W5500

4802 -30.2%

Radeon R9 290

3619 -47.4%

Blender

GeForce RTX 5090

15026.3 +628.7%

RTX A4500

3514.46 +70.4%

GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

2062

Radeon RX 6800S

1064 -48.4%

GeForce GTX 1070 GDDR5X

561 -72.8%

OctaneBench

GeForce RTX 4090

1328 +633.7%

GeForce RTX 4070 Mobile

349 +92.8%

GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q Refresh

181

Quadro M5000

89 -50.8%

T550 Mobile

47 -74%