Highly anticipated: Nvidia has finally announced the long-awaited GeForce RTX 2060 with claims that it can outperform the GTX 1070 Ti and beat the GTX 1060 by 40-60%. At only $349 that sounds like a steal, but given how misleading Nvidia was about the original RTX, will it really perform that well?
Nvidia has shared a graph comparing 2060 performance with 1060 performance, and despite the fact it's about $100 more, the 2060 still trumps it in value. In Hitman and Doom it's about 40% better, in Sniper Elite 4 and Battlefront II it's about 50% better and it exceeds 60% for Black Ops 2 and Wolfenstein II. Bear in mind though, these games were cherry-picked by Nvidia.
Nvidia was quite vague about the full specifications of the card, but we'll update once they are revealed. For now, we know that it will feature 6GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 and 5 gigarays/sec of ray tracing performance. Nvidia's claims that the 2060 can run Battlefield V at 60 fps with ray tracing do seem to be genuine, given that the RTX 2070 exceeds 70 fps on low settings with 6 gigarays/sec.
The 2060 will launch on January 15th with a variety of board partners in addition to the standard Founder's Edition variant. For the first time, system manufacturers will be releasing new systems featuring the card on day one. Nvidia claims that almost every computer manufacturer in the world will be selling systems with the 2060.
Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's CEO and founder, recognized how important the x60 part of their lineup was during his presentation. "Desktop gamers are demanding, and the RTX 2060 sets a new standard --- an unbeatable price, extraordinary performance and real-time ray tracing that blurs the distinction between movies and games." The GTX 1060 is currently Nvidia's most popular GPU.
As a bonus, Nvidia is also offering a free copy of Battlefield V or Anthem (which will also feature ray tracing support) with any new RTX 2060 or RTX 2070 purchases. The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti will come with free copies of both games.
The 2060 certainly looks promising, but as usual, we'll have to wait until we can benchmark and review one to see if it lives up to Nvidia's bold claims.