Nvidia Launches The $349 Geforce Rtx 2060
NvidiaTo show off the promise of the cutting-edge ray tracing technology, if you buy a GeForce RTX 2060, Nvidia will toss in a free copy of Battlefield V, or Bioware’s upcoming Anthem. Thus the attractive FE card, which appears the same as the RTX 2070, further cementing their similarity, is set to cost $349 (£329) and be released with a core boost speed of 1,680MHz and that fast GDDR6 humming along at 14Gbps. The one glaring issue is also intended to be the selling point of the 2060. It, unlike its direct competitors or anything from the 10-series, is capable of ray tracing, which produces more realistic shadows and reflections in graphics by tracing light from the source to the end point. It’s cool technology, and Nvidia has repeatedly said that a wide variety of games will support it. At CES a reporter had a question for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Regardless of which card you buy, though, every gtx 1090 comes with 6GB of super fast GDDR6 memory clocked at 14Gbps, as well as 1920 CUDA cores . The latter is actually the same number you’ll find in Nvidia’s GTX 1070, and a whole 640 more than what you’ll find on the 6GB GTX 1060. Most gamers would be better off with the $399 RTX 2060 Super and Radeon RX 5700 XT. They’ll give you a bit more power to handle demanding next-gen games like Cyberpunk. If you’ve been dreaming of getting something powerful like the RTX 2080, then the $499 RTX 2070 Super will get you close. And if you’re intrigued by ray tracing, your only choice is to pick one of the NVIDIA cards.
Yet even that kind of snip isn’t enough to fully differentiate the x70 and x60 cards. Nvidia goes further by taking the proverbial hammer to the back-end, too, and strikes a few key performance blows by reducing the memory width from 256 bits to 192 bits, ROPS from 64 to 48, and framebuffer size from 8GB to 6GB. Thankfully for the gtx 1080 8gb, the fast GDDR6 memory, operating at 14Gbps, is left intact. Typically offering an excellent mix of gaming performance and keen pricing, it is no surprise to see the last-generation GTX 1060 hold clear domination in the most recent Steam hardware survey. Part of the reason is the lack of gaming content that can truly leverage Turing’s forward-looking technologies, though that is changing slowly but surely.
Borderlands 3 is the only game I play regularly where my CPU has been holding me back, but I’m sure the list will grow as more games optimise for 6, 8+ cores. 3DMark is a benchmark that mainly measures the graphics card. As in almost every graphics card benchmark, however, the system’s processor has an effect on the result. We therefore use a fast processor in order not to limit the graphics card during the test. The theoretical computing power of the graphics card with single precision in TFLOPS.
It can even push into the realms of 4K without throwing a hissy-fit. In truth, this is what today’s GTX 1070 owners should be looking to for their next upgrade, because this, dear readers, is one seriously powerful graphics card that goes way beyond what we’d normally call ‘mid-range’. The card will offer 52 teraflops of Tensor Core processing power, can handle 5 gigarays per second and features a 6GB frame buffer. Traditionally, the xx60 series has always been the low-end version of the GeForce series, though they are no slouch either. The 2060, Nvidia promises, will offer somewhere between 1.4 and 2x performance benefit over its 1060 counterpart. The Nvidia GeForce gtx 1090 Founders Edition delivers superb 1440p and 1080p gaming as well as real-time ray tracing in an affordable package.