P
C gaming enthusiasts with deep
pockets have had access to Nvidia’s
Turing RTX graphics cards for several
months now. They’re good cards,
though their steep price tags keep them
well outside the reach of the majority
of PC gamers. Most gamers just aren’t
interested in dropping $800+ on the
(until now) most affordable RTX card
— the RTX 2070. Widespread ray
tracing adoption will never happen at
those prices. The RTX 2060 is now the
cheapest RTX series card, though calling
a $600+ card cheap is a misnomer
for sure.
The RTX 2060 is the successor to the
GTX 1060 in name only pretty much.
The number of Cuda cores has increased
from 1280 to 1920, memory bandwidth
increased from 192GB/s to 336GB/s and
of course the price has gone up by a hefty
amount too. That’s before mentioning the
RTX features.
It’s those RTX ray tracing features that
Nvidia has bet the farm on. The die space
hogging RT and Tensor cores are at the
heart of what Nvidia is trying to achieve
with Turing. While the potential is there,While the forward
looking features are very
impressive, the jury is still
out on whether ray tracing is
a game changer or not.
we are yet to see it outside of a limited
number of demos and titles. Now that
we have the hardware, it’s time for the
developers to start implementing the tech
in software. Battlefield V is among the first
games and many more are coming that
include ray tracing and other features like
DLSS. While ray traced lighting effects look
gorgeous, is it truly a game changer? Will
the Deep Learning focused Tensor cores
deliver on their potential? We look forward
to seeing whether ray tracing is the real
deal or not.
The RTX 2060 uses the TU106 die, the
same as the one powering the RTX 2070,
though it has some of its cores disabled. It
comes with 1920 CUDA cores, 240 Tensor
cores and 30 RT cores. This compares with
the 2304 CUDA cores, 288 Tensor cores
and 36 RT cores of the full TU106 GPU. It
comes with 6GB of GDDR6 memory over
a 192-bit bus. The TDP of the Founders
Edition RTX 2060 is a perfectly reasonable
160W. That’s not bad at all for a graphics
card with a large 445mm2 die. As was the
case with the RTX 2070, the 2060 doesn’t
support NV-Link, so gaming is limited to a
single card only.TECH REVIEW WWhen evaluating the RTX 2060, we can
largely repeat what we said when covering
the RTX 2070: While the forward looking
features are very impressive, the jury is
still out on whether ray tracing is a game
changer or not. Current game performance
is the differentiator that matters most. The
price increase over the GTX 1060 places
the 2060 against the likes of the well-
established RX Vega cards and popular
previous generation GTX 1070 and 1070
Ti. If it can beat those cards whilst being
cheaper, then we’re looking at a winner.
Throw in the RTX features as a cherry on
top instead of the primary selling point
and the RTX 2060 looks like a genuinely
compelling buy.
CHRIS SZEWCZYKNvidia
RTX 2060
Is this the RTX sweet spot?
Ghost Recon Wildlands (Very High Preset) Shadow of War (Ultra Preset) 3DMark Temperatures ©
1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160 1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160 Firestrike Firestrike Extreme Idle Load
Min Avg Min Avg Min Avg Avg Avg Avg
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
Founders Edition76.69 88.69 56.32 67.45 28.49 38.50 94 66 39 16583 8611 36 71MSI GeForce RTX 2060
Gaming Z 6G79.51 93.35 59.94 68.25 30.33 39.43 97 70 40 16956 8722 38 68Nvidia 2060 Benchmarks Indictaes Best Result
CPU: Intel i7-8700K @ 4.8GHz all cores • Motherboard: ASRock Z370 Taichi • RAM: 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3200 • Power Supply: Antec HCP-1200W • Storage: 1Tb Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD • Cooling:
Corsair H100i Pro • Operating system: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit