Anyone can tell an eagle from an ostrich. It takes a skilled birdwatcher to tell a chipping sparrow from a house sparrow from an American tree sparrow. Now researchers are using AI to take this to the next level -- identifying individual birds. André Ferreira, a Ph.D. student at France's Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology, harnessed an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 to train a powerful AI that identifies individual birds within the same species. It's the latest example of how deep learning has become a powerful tool for wildlife biologists studying a wide range of animals.

EVGA's custom GeForce RTX 2070 XC graphics card is cooler, more customizable, and just as fast as Nvidia's RTX 2070 Founders Edition. It's packing dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing and AI-enhanced graphics. That shouldn't be a big deal. Nvidia's Founders Edition cards were designed to be premium priced halo(ish) models, right? But when the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti released last month, third-party board makers like EVGA, Asus, and MSI treated the premium pricing of the Founders Edition models as the cost floor rather than a cost ceiling.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 is a graphics card built for the future, just like the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. And just like its siblings, the RTX 2070's futuristic hardware comes at a stiff price premium. At a $500 starting price and $600 for the Nvidia Founders Edition being reviewed here, the inclusion of dedicated RTX hardware bumps the price of Nvidia's traditionally midrange xx70 GPUs up by well over $100, planting it in the range of the existing GTX 1080. But unlike with the RTX 2080, Nvidia isn't asking you to invest solely in as-yet-unfulfilled promises for the future. The GeForce RTX 2070 delivers an appreciable bump over the GTX 1080's performance in today's games, too. You can still find the older graphics card on sale all over the place, though, and often at a discount.