NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 detailed review

The latest member of the new NVIDIA RTX family is the mid-range RTX 2060. After managing to incorporate a whole new paradigm with hardware-accelerated ray tracing features, new Turing architecture-based NVIDIA cards were marketed with ray tracing and DLSS features. Although the graphics cards were quite well received, the new features certainly weren’t there because no video games were sent with them at launch. Even now, it’s only Battlefield V that has Ray tracing enabled while others haven’t pushed the new feature yet. Needless to say, Ray tracing is seen as a complete luxury in your video gaming experience and this means that most gamers are going to take a risk-averse approach and buy something between 60-class or 50-class graphics. Cards. It’s not just our opinion, even NVIDIA and so the upcoming GTX 1660 Ti graphics card that will be shipped without the fancy RTX feature. Hopefully, with the second generation of RTX cards, the feature set will be better optimized and we will have more games that have RTX.

NVIDIA RTX 2060 Founders Edition Specification

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is based on the same TU106 GPU that powers the RTX 2070. Until now, with all previous generations of NVIDIA graphics cards, the 60-grade graphics card has always had a different GPU. This time around, it looks like we’re getting a cut-down variant of the RTX 2060’s big brother. Since it is an RTX card, we get 30 RT cores which is only six cores less than RTX 2070.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Specification
Card	RTX 2060 FE	GTX 1060 6GB	RTX 2070	GTX 1070
Architecture	Turing	Pascal	Turing	Pascal
GPU	TU106	GP106	TU106	GP104
Chuda color	1920	1280	2304	1920
ROPs	48	48	64	64
Core clock	1365 MHz	1506 MHz	1410 MHz	1506 MHz
Boost watch	1680 MHz	1709 MHz	1710 MHz	1683 MHz
Memory clock	14 Gbps	8 Gbps	14 Gbps	8 Gbps
Memory type	GDDR6	GDDR5	GDDR6	GDDR5
Memory bus width	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit
VRAM	6 GB	6 GB	8 GB	8 GB
Single precision perf.	6.5 TFLPS	4.4 TFLOPs	7.9 TFLOPS	6.5 TFLPS
“RTX-OPS”	37	N / A	45T	N / A
SLI support	No.	No.	No.	Yes
Transistor count	10.8B	4.4B	10.8B	7.2B
Method of making	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 16nm
TDP	160W	120W	185W	150W
Launch price	$ 349	299	599	449

Another thing to note is the price, we see a 60-class graphics card that is $ 150 more expensive than its predecessor. This is a huge leap given that 60-class graphics cards are the sweet spot in NVIDIA’s lineup. This is why 15.39% of Steam users have GTX 1060, which is a good 6% ahead of other popular cards. Suffice it to say, the RTX 2060 will never end up being a favorite among gamers.

The RPX 2060 will be exciting to see if any of the new cards can be cross-flashed to unlock similarly provided, disabled cores of the GPU. This will only be possible if the disabled are not mixed. One can always hope.

Performance

Our test rig has been upgraded to keep up with the times and new Windows releases. This means that not all of our legacy scores are comparable, especially as CPU performance has increased significantly. Here’s what we’re running at the moment.

Processor – Intel Core i9 9900K
CPU Cooler – Corsair H115i RGB Platinum
Motherboard – ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO
RAM – 2x 8 GB G.Skill Trident Z Royal 3200 MHz
SSD – Corsair MP510
PSU – Corsair HX1050

Graphics card:
RTX 2080 Ti
RTX 2080
RTX 2070
AMD RX 590

We run a general set of synthetics on the RTX 2060, including 3DMark, Unigine, Compubench and a few more benchmarks. Here’s how the RTX 2060 worked.

The part of this graph that stands out is the relative performance in the family and how it has grown since Maxwell. Our older benchmarks peg GTX 960 to GTX 980 FireStrike scores in a ratio of 1.95. Which means it’s about to be the most delusional time of the year, as well as 80x-class card performance. Now if we look at how the RTX 2060 compares to the RTX 2080, the same metric generates a factor of 1.26. Basically, the RTX 2060 is much closer to the RTX 2080 than the previous generation graphics cards. This should tell you why the price of RTX 2060 is so high. Not only is it expensive to start with new Turing cards but the relative performance also contributes to the high cost. However, gamers don’t spend days and nights comparing 3DMark scores, so let’s take a look at how this fare is in gaming.

We see a very linear scaling of performance across the RTX family of graphics cards. Please note that the standard 10-series card comes from our old test rig which had a different HEDT CPU. The difference in performance is not so great but for consistency we do not use the same in our scoring method. For 1080p gaming, the RTX 2060 equals the GTX 1070 Ti in virtually all DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 video games. The same trend is seen even when the resolution is scaled higher. With the 10-Series card, we see a much lower frame rate at higher resolutions. Don’t bother looking at the Far Cry 5 number because it’s one of the least scaled video games we’ve ever seen. This is the only game where GTX 1080 Ti still scores higher than RTX 2080 Ti. You can also see how the RTX 2060 frame rate is close to the frame rates of the RTX 2070. With 10-series cards, this delta is much more. What we’re seeing is not just a 60-class card.

Pricing

The NVIDIA RTX 2060 Founders Edition is priced at Rs.31,000 and is associated with a free game. If you get RTX 2060 FE then you can choose either Anthem or Battlefield V. Not all partner cards receive free games from NVIDIA even though they themselves are absolutely free to offer bundles. There are multiple threads where confused buyers are not getting the bundled game because the retailer is not participating in the bundle program. The price of the card in NVIDIA’s own store is lower than what their board partners are currently offering. So NVIDIA has an obvious advantage and there is virtually no reason to get a partner card unless they have a price offer that is better than what NVIDIA is offering.

To better understand this, we created a graph to show the value of money for each of these cards based on the 3DMark Ultra score vs. their current India value. With or without video game bundle, RTX 2060 now offers really good value for your money. The AMD RX 590 is in second place followed by the previous Zen GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1070 which seems to be a good buy. We added an overlay of curves indicating relative benchmark scores in red to show performance with each other. The performance of the RTX 2060 is very close to that of the GTX 1070 which makes it really good but the GTX 1070 has the advantage of having 8 GB of VRAM as compared to the 6 GB of the RTX 2060. The GTX 1070 Ti would be a better option if we offset the cost of additional memory. However, the two cards use different memory technologies. The RTX 2060 has fast GDDR6 memory with a growing bandwidth of 336 GB / s whereas the GTX 1070 Ti tops the list at 256 GB / s which means the RTX 2060 has more overhead and thus less interruption. Please do not start our SLI. TL; DR – RTX 2060 gives you the best leg for your money

Judgment

NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 is a welcome addition to the RTX family of graphics cards. It has received quite a performance upgrade compared to the previous generation GTX 1060 and comes with a price tag for the match. One could argue that the premium is for RT cores and they would be fine but 60-class graphics cards always fill the gaps in affordability and performance. The RTX 2060 gets the performance part right but is nowhere near being affordable, not at all for the Indian market. Even NVIDIA knows that we are going to see the GTX 1660 Ti in about a month without any fancy RT cores. Another difference with this new generation is that the RTX 2060 is very close to the RTX 2070 in particular. They share the same GPU even though the RTX 2060 has six SM disabled.

This is why we see performances that are far beyond what we are accustomed to seeing. It feels a bit like Maxwell’s second arrival, but the price tag pulls it off. In terms of performance, we have a card that is equal to (and sometimes better) the GTX 1070 Ti in 1080p as well as the 1440p gaming benchmark. It’s faster than the Radeon Vega 56. However, we don’t see it selling better than the previous 60-class graphics cards. This will definitely match the sales of the 70-class graphics card. All of this makes the RTX 2060 an excellent gateway card for those looking to experience hardware accelerated ray-tracing. Gamers can wait a month for the launch of GTX 1660 Ti for those who want an affordable and powerful card.