My "obsolete" RTX 2070 Super still games, streams, and sharpens my video, and it's only getting started

Published Sep 28, 2026, 12:01 PM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. I've got a fairly old GPU at home, and it's old by whatever standards you'd care to measure it against. The RTX 2070 Super was barely keeping pace with AAA games three years ago, and it hasn't gotten any younger since. Its 2,560 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6 work with Turing's first-generation ray-tracing cores, which are the ones made to walk before later generations could run. At a boost clock frequency of 1,770 MHz, its rasterization performance was never worth writing home about. And yet, the gaming rig I built around it back in 2020 is still alive and well, pulling off things I would never have expected of it when I first slotted the card into the old B450M. Perhaps it's too old for the latest games without some of my tricks, but then again, those tricks are why I'm writing this to begin with. Here's how my 6-year-old GPU continues to be of excellent service. My six-year-old rig became the best living room console I have All it needed was the Game Pass, a controller, the Xbox Mode, and the 2070 S Even though I've always had my eyes on one, I never really could justify spending an extra $750 on an Xbox Series X, especially because Microsoft kept bringing all their goodies to the PC ecosystem. The one thing that I was missing that makes console a console was an interface that allowed me to sit back, rely on nothing but my Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, and get the console experience the second I switched the PC on. So, naturally, when Windows 11 first introduced the Xbox Mode, I was amongst the first to flip the switch and find out whether it could turn the PC into a console I had been eyeing all this time. As I said on my first look at the feature, it's seriously impressive, and for those looking for a controller-first experience on the PC, there's arguably no better alternative to it. The GPU, however, still has to run the games, but my setup is quite benevolent to even an old card. My TV is a 1080p LED panel, which is exactly the resolution the card is still good at, so it has rarely asked for more than it can give. Most titles are perfectly playable as long as you're not chasing ray-tracing, which, as any Turing graphics owner would know, has been a nightmare since day one. The handful of other titles that the card can't manage on its own gets a leg up from a $7 utility known as Lossless Scaling, and in particular, its LS1 upscaler. It's usually enough to pull them back to a rather comfy frame rate. It's also more than happy running emulators running Vulkan API. It's not a Series X and won't be playing GTA 6 anytime soon, but it can still play most of the Game Pass library I already paid for. Most titles are perfectly playable with this GPU as long as you're not chasing ray-tracing. No laptop in my house needs its own GPU because of it The aging GPU does all the streaming and gaming for them In the living room, the 2070 Super makes the old rig into something of a console in its own right, but what's arguably a little more impressive than that is the fact that it can serve those games to basically any device with a decoder in the house. A card like the 2070 Super can pull double duty here, working as a game-streaming server as well as a gaming PC, and that's thanks to an open-source utility called Sunshine and the card's dedicated NVENC encoder, which handles the stream without eating into the gaming performance. This means that the same card can run Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on my LED TV and Hello Kitty Island Adventure on my sister's M2 MacBook Air when needed. The GPU simply renders whatever it's given and sends the result wherever I happen to be sitting. It doesn't have to stop at games, either. The same NVENC block that packages the game stream will transcode video just as well, so any rig running this GPU can double as a Jellyfin server and provide the media library to whatever screen in the house is asking for it. It continues to make my video streams look crispier RTX Video Super Resolution puts the cores to work outside of gaming When I'm not gaming, I'm usually catching an episode of whatever it is that I happen to be watching that week, and a lot of what I watch is old, like, Twin Peaks kind of old. This means that some of my media never made it past 480p and DVD rips from before HD was a given. On a 1080p screen, the graininess and the awkward compression look worse still, which is why it pays yet again to have an RTX GPU, no matter how old. Credit: Nvidia. Nvidia's AI video upscaler, RTX Video Super Resolution, puts the same Tensor cores that make DLSS possible to work on ordinary videos in the browser. It can run on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, and once the switch is flipped on the Nvidia app, it gets the job done. The impact is rather subtle, but you can notice it when you're on a machine that doesn't have it. But there are many more things to do with an old GPU When I purchased this GPU, I hadn't envisioned that I'd be using it for all the things I use it for today. I simply assumed by now it would be listed on a marketplace, or possibly be mining Ethereum on someone else's machine. It still games, streams, sharpens my video, and has just enough VRAM for me to load a small local model whenever needed. Right now, I'm interested in seeing whether I could put its cores towards upscaling some old photographs and videos I have from the Sony Handycam era, and I'm fairly certain it'll surprise me there too.