40 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 FOUNDERS EDITION
1070 Ti, and $600 GTX 1080 Founders
Edition models, as well as this generation’s
GeForce RTX 2070. Rounding things out for
Team Green is EVGA’s customized,
overclocked GeForce GTX 1060 SSC, to
represent the RTX 2060’s predecessor. On
the AMD side of things, we’re testing the
$290 XFX Radeon RX 390 Fatboy, $400
Radeon Vega 56, and $500 Radeon Vega 64.
(All prices listed are launch prices; these cards
can be found cheaper on the street today.)
Each game is tested using its in-game
benchmark at the highest possible graphics
presets, with VSync, frame rate caps, and all GPU
vendor-specific technologies—like AMD TressFX,
Nvidia GameWorks options, and FreeSync/G-
Sync—disabled, and temporal anti-aliasing (TAA)
enabled to push these cards to their
limits. If anything differs from that,
we’ll mention it. Dropping graphics
settings would create higher
performance results. We
focused our testing on 1440p and
1080p, as those are the natural
resolutions for these graphics cards.PERFORMANCE
BENCHMARKS
Strange Brigade
Let’s kick things off with Strange
Brigade ($50 on Humble at
go.pcworld.com/bysb), a
cooperative third-person shooter
where a team of adventurers blaststhrough hordes of mythological enemies. It’s a
technological showcase, built around the
next-gen Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies
and infused with features like HDR support and
the ability to toggle asynchronous compute on
and off. It uses Rebellion’s custom Azure engine.
We test with async compute off.
If you look only at generation-to-generation,
the RTX 2060 Founders Edition is a whopping
55 percent faster than the overclocked EVGA
GTX 1060 SSC at 1440p resolution. But again,
the new card costs $90 more and is priced more
like a GTX 1070; it’s 12.5 percent faster than that
card, and trades blows with the mighty GTX
1070 Ti and Radeon Vega 56. That’s a trend we’ll
see throughout testing, though the RTX 2060 FE
pulls further ahead in games that lean moreAMD Radeon
Vega 56
Nvidia GTX
1070 Ti (FE)
Nvidia GeForce
RTX 2060 (FE)
AMD Radeon
Vega 64
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (FE)Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (FE)Strange Brigade
(Frames per second)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE8481819487951291211321161141131080p 1440p