Nvidia Launches The $349 Geforce Rtx 2060
Whenever that happens, as a company you need to set things right. The first attempt at that will be what we review today, a product that most people can afford, the GeForce RTX 2060. It’s another £100 / $100 more expensive than the GTX 1060, with Nvidia’s Founders Edition on test here going for £329 / $349 while third party cards currently start at £350 / $350, but when it comes to speed, it’s in another league altogether. Whereas the GTX 1060 struggled to hit 60fps on higher quality settings at 1440p, the RTX 2060 sails past that number and then some.
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 RTX 2060, 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.
The Havok physics engine causes objects to fly around if ini tweaks aren’t made when uncapping the fps. Yes, the GeForce gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb maintains the inflated pricing of other RTX options, which effectively bumps the cost of each performance tier up a notch. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest GTX 1070-like performance for significantly less money, wrapped up in a package that also has reasonable ray tracing and DLSS capability to boot. GeForce RTX 2060 comes to market in the usual Founders Edition and partner models. What’s interesting this time around is that Nvidia removes the factory overclock and price premium present on other RTX FE cards and goes for stock on both fronts. The upshot of this GPU-wide disablement is performance that ought to be around 75 per cent of the RTX 2070, so thoroughly decent at FHD, decent at QHD, but generally not up to scratch at UHD.
Pre-built system may require less power depending on system configuration. NVIDIA GPUs accelerate your work with incredible boosts in performance. Bigger workloads, more features, and faster than you ever imagined. gtx 1080 8gb Welcome to NVIDIA Studio—and your new, more creative, process. Simultaneous floating point and integer processing enables Turing GPUs to more efficiently process the compute heavy workloads of modern games.
This review covers the reference card, also referred to as founder edition. This 160 Watts rated graphics card has 1920 activated shader processors . It has a proper 1680 MHz boost clock for the standard founder version and there will be no differentiation for the reference values compared to the AIB partners. The card has 6 GB of the now familiar GDDR6 memory running a 192-bit wide bus (336 GB/s), the price is 349 USD. The GeForce RTX 2060 does have dedicated RT cores, though—30 of them, compared to 36 in the RTX 2070, 46 in the RTX 2080, and 72 in the $1,200 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. A future BFV update will add in Nvidia’s performance-enhancing Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, too, and Nvidia claims that will boost ray tracing performance even more, as shown in the chart below.
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.
But I can’t help think that if AMD had decided to release the RX 590 after the gtx 1080 8gb, it probably would have been dismissed within 3.87 seconds of its untimely arrival. GeForce RTX® 2060 features a dedicated hardware encoder that unlocks the ability to game and stream simultaneously with superior quality. RTX graphics cards are optimized for your favorite streaming apps to provide maximum performance for your live stream. This CPU will result in reduced performance in some titles, if you go for a 2070 or a 2070 super. I have this configuration myself – i7 6700k , rtx 2070 super, 1440p 144hz monitor.
Active but more limited I should say, the GeForce RTX 2060, really is making use of a reconfigured GeForce RTX 2070 chip. The GPU has been cut-down as well as the memory configuration in size. The new RTX series is mostly about DX-R (DirectX-R compatible hardware accelerated Raytracing).
But for right now, Nvidia’s software continues to be better, accelerating GPU performance not just in games, but in traditional work tasks. That was until I got to our Blender test, in which we time how long it takes a GPU to render a 3D object in Blender. Thanks to a recent software update that provided better support for programs like Blender, the 2060 not only beat the Vega 56, but even the 2080 Ti, which I tested only a couple of months ago. It has been a fairly crazy ride with NVIDIA the past few months, roughly 4-5 months ago the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti became available.
The problem is that most games don’t support ray tracing yet. While Battlefield V is a very pretty game, the ray tracing is only a tiny aspect of that beauty, and certainly not enough to warrant upgrading. So for now, if you have a 1070 or 1070 Ti or better, or an AMD Vega 56 or better, then you shouldn’t upgrade. But if you’ve been sitting on an older GPU waiting for something to suck less and give you good performance in 1440p or lower resolutions, then the 2060, for $350, is a pretty dang good deal.