NVIDIA’s “GTX 2070” Exists As An Engineering Sample For The Now-RTX GPU
NVIDIA’s “GTX 2070” Exists As An Engineering Sample For The Now-RTX GPU
Image: @unnatural__log (X/Twitter)
User Liu Jiacheng has posted on X (Twitter) the story of an engineering sample GPU that was once called the NVIDIA GTX 2070. It’s unclear how the card made it into the market (as engineering samples or prototypes are not for sale), but Liu has managed to purchase this card recently, six years since the Turing GPU’s official release.
From the outside, it looks the same as what eventually became the RTX 2070 today, but the branding on the GPU’s top side has the “GEFORCE GTX” branding on it. Notably, this particular GPU doesn’t feature the same core specs as the retail RTX 2070 – this GTX 2070, while using the same TU106 silicon, comes with slightly fewer CUDA cores compared to the retail model (2176 vs 2304 cores).
Image: @unnatural__log (X/Twitter)
This is where differences end between the two cards, which allowed Liu to flash a retail vBIOS in an attempt to make this GPU work. The GTX 2070 did manage to function, albeit not without its challenges. After several vBIOS changes, the card managed to surpass the retail RTX 2070 while overclocked, achieving 10,064 points in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark.
Image: @unnatural__log (X/Twitter)
The existence of this GTX 2070 does prove that NVIDIA once planned to stick to its well-known GTX branding at the time, but the company eventually switched to the RTX branding to signify the importance of ray tracing technologies. Since then, the company has enjoyed a great brand presence with its RTX branding, well beyond just the name of GPUs themselves. As for the GTX branding, it is now history as Team Green officially retired the final GTX lineup from production, the GTX 16 series.
Source: Videocardz
Pokdepinion: That was an interesting piece of history.
