NVIDIA has officially announced their latest Turing graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2060. Aiming the mainstream market, the GeForce RTX 2060 aims to deliver the same RTX features of the higher end Turing graphics cards for a more affordable price range.
NVIDIA Unveils GeForce RTX 2060 Graphics Card For The Mainstream Audience at $349 US, 15th January Availability
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is the fourth desktop graphics card in the Turing based GeForce RTX 20 series lineup. While the other cards have been aiming the $500 US+ price tags, the GeForce RTX 2060 delivers RTX features for under $400 US. The GeForce RTX 2060 is going to launch on 15th of January for a price of $349 US for founders edition. At the same time, custom models would also be available from NVIDIA’s AIB partners which we will be rounding up in a bit.
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“Next-gen gaming starts today for tens of millions of gamers everywhere,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who unveiled the RTX 2060 at the start of the CES tradeshow. “Desktop gamers are demanding, and the RTX 2060 sets a new standard — an unbeatable price, extraordinary performance and real-time ray tracing that blurs the distinction between movies and games. This is a great moment for gamers and our industry.”
via NVIDIA
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 – These are the full specifications
Coming to the specifications, the GeForce RTX 2060 the card will be using the TU106 GPU core. This GPU SKU will be slightly cut down from the full variant on the RTX 2070, featuring 1920 CUDA cores, 240 Tensor Cores, 30 RT cores, 120 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The card will feature clock speeds in the 1365 MHz (Base) and 1680 MHz (Boost) range while delivering up to 6.5 TFLOPs of Compute performance.
Related Watch The NVIDIA CES 2019 Press Event CEO Jensen Huang’s Opening Keynote Live Here
Since the card has 6 lower RT cores than the RTX 2070, it ends up with around 5 Giga Rays per second worth of ray tracing performance. I think NVIDIA will try to make 5 Giga Rays a bare minimum for designating a card as RTX. It will make sense since anything below would not be playable unless dropping the resolution below 1080p which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in this time and age.
When it comes to memory specifications, the card would feature 6 GB of GDDR6 memory along with a 192-bit bus interface, running at 14 Gbps. This would deliver 336 GB/s of bandwidth for the card which is higher than the GeForce GTX 1080 with 10 Gbps GDDR5X dies. The card will come with a single 8-pin connector on the reference variant and feature the standard display config of Turing cards which include 3 DP, 1 HDMI, and 1 USB Type-C port.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series Graphics Cards Official Specifications
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 – These are the full performance numbers
As for the performance numbers, Videocardz posted a few days ago showing both 1080p and 1440p results for the RTX 2060 while comparing it to the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080. At 1080p, the GeForce RTX 2060 had a clear lead over the GTX 1070 in several AAA titles. In 12 out of the 20 titles tested (excluding RTX titles), the RTX 2060 was faster than the GTX 1070 Ti. It was also faster than the GTX 1080 in 3 titles while being neck-on-neck in other titles.
When comparing performance at 1440p, the RTX 2060 leads or matches the GTX 1070 Ti in 15 different AAA titles. This is a bigger improvement over 1080p while over the GTX 1080, the RTX 2060 leads in 3 titles and coming really close to the rest. We can see overclocked variants closing the difference between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Ti (both cards which are really close to each in terms of performance and feature 8 GB GDDR5X memory compared to 6 GB GDDR6 on the RTX 2060.
The RTX 2060 is 60 percent faster on current titles than the prior-generation GTX 1060, NVIDIA’s most popular GPU, and beats the gameplay of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.
With Turing’s RT Cores and Tensor Cores, it can run Battlefield V with ray tracing at 60 frames per second.
via NVIDIA
Over the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070, we can see the RTX 2060 as a clear winner with good gen over gen improvement in performance.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 – This what RTX On and RTX Off Looks Like
There’s also RTX numbers as many were speculating that the RTX 2060 may have underperformed when it comes to the ray tracing feature. That may not be the case and the performance is actually similar to that of the RTX 2070 with RTX enabled. Following are some numbers:
- Battlefield V: RT Off: 90 FPS
- Battlefield V: RT On + DLSS Off: 65 FPS
- Battlefield V: RT On + DLSS On: 88 FPS
Here you can see that NVIDIA is putting more emphasis on the use of DLSS with RTX enabled to gain the same performance numbers as you would with RTX disabled. One more thing to note is that with RTX on Ultra at 1080p, the card scores 58 FPS while with Medium preset, it scores 66 FPS. Similarly, at 1440p, the card has a 10 FPS difference between RTX Ultra and RTX Medium preset.
So When Can I Buy One and For How Much?
As mentioned before, the GeForce RTX 2060 would be available for $349 US and that would be the base price for the custom models. The card will be introduced on 7th of January with an official availability planned for 15th January.
The card would get a bundle promotion with the selected AAA titles being either Battlefield V or Anthem, a copy of which users will be able to redeem for free on the purchase of the GeForce RTX 2060. You can check out the bundle promotion which is valid for RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 here. You can order your NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 at the official GeForce webpage here.
