Nvidia Launches The $349 Geforce Rtx 2060
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 RTX 2060 Founders Edition delivers superb 1440p and 1080p gaming as well as real-time ray tracing in an affordable package.
The card comes fitted with just one rear positioned power headers (8-pin). The card offers one HDMI ports and two DisplayPort outputs, a DVI connector and the new Virtual link connector. This Turing 106 GPU empowered product keeps that GPU at roughly 65 Degrees C marker depending on game load. Though the GDDR6 memory has been not been tweaked, the ICs are stock 14 GHz (effective clock-rate) but can be bumped upward towards 15 to 16 GHz with the flick of your fingers as we’ll show you in the tweaking chapters. Say hello to the GeForce RTX 2060, after which we’ll dive into the nitty gritty over the next pages.
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 gtx 1080 8gb. 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.
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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.
The second issue is price vs. performance, with the cheapest RTX 2070 fetching £450 but barely any faster than the GTX 1080 from the Pascal generation. The most compelling thing about the RTX 2060, though, isn’t all the Turing stuff that makes it special. It’s the price, which is something the RTX 2080, RTX 2080Ti and even the RTX 2070 didn’t really have on their side when they launched at the end of last year. The tide has turned a bit now, but when those first came out, they were all either more expensive than their nearest GTX counterpart, or only a teensy bit more powerful. The RTX 2060, on the other hand, sits firmly on the right side of the power/price line for me, offering as much, if not more juice than the GTX 1070Ti for a fraction of its cost.
£329 / £349 compared to $430 / $480 is an appreciable saving in my book, which is why it’s my recommended card for 1440p gaming, period. The rest, DLSS and ray-tracing games alike, are all still MIA and really need to hurry the hell up. Where the gtx 1090 really comes into its own is gaming at 2560×1440. Here, the RTX 2060 trounces its cheaper competition and roundly smashes its more expensive rivals, producing near flawless 60fps frame rates on maximum or so-very-near-Ultra-it-might-as-well-be settings pretty much across the board. At $499, the RTX 2070 Super is a better bet for enthusiasts.
It replaces the original model, and you can think of it as a slightly slower version of the RTX 2080. The 2070 Super gets 256 more CUDA cores, 16 additional texture units, and faster clock speeds . All of that gtx 1090 hardware makes it faster than the GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA’s last-gen cream of the crop. NVIDIA’s new RTX Super graphics cards are clearly a response to AMD’s new midrange GPUs, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT.