Truth to be told, the arrival of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has been anticipated by many since the day its higher-end siblings RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti were revealed at GeForce Gaming Celebration event in Cologne a few months ago. It is just simply how things work for the company’s consumer-oriented graphics series as per what we’ve seen before with Pascal-based GTX 1060, GTX 960 from the Maxwell family, and GTX 760 of the Kepler era.
Hence, its role remained the same as the RTX 2060 is indeed the mid-tier Turing-based offering from NVIDIA. Of course, being a Turing card, it is also designed for ray-tracing alongside delivering the performance upgrade that consumers would expect from a new graphics card.
When it comes to raw performance, NVIDIA stated that the RTX 2060 has enough firepower to rival previous generation high-end cards such as GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080. In due time, we will test that claim in our full review but for now, let’s take a quick look at the amount of firepower contained within the latest mid-range offering from NVIDIA.
SPECIFICATIONS AND DESIGN
According to NVIDIA, the GPU on the RTX 2060 is the same Turing TU106 chip used on the higher-end model, the RTX 2070. Aside from having the same brain, it looks like the company has also adopted the same physical body from RTX 2070 for the RTX 2060 as well.
Of course, there are indeed some tweaks being done to the card as you can see from the differences of the card’s specifications right here:
Unlike the higher-end RTX 20 series cards which are factory overclocked, the RTX 2060 Founders Edition comes with stock clock speed though. For those who prefer to own a factory overclocked model, fret not as such card will be made available by NVIDIA’s board partners as usual.
TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero motherboard and ASUS ROG PG27A 4K Gaming Monitor are courtesy of ASUS Malaysia.
G.SKILL Trident Z RGB DDR4 memory modules are courtesy of G.SKILL.
WD Blue 3D NAND Solid State Drive is courtesy of Western Digital Malaysia.
Cooler Master Hyper H411R CPU cooler and Cooler Master MasterWatt 750W power supply are courtesy of Cooler Master Malaysia.
HEAD TO HEAD WITH GTX 1060
To briefly see how much the potential performance that RTX 2060 has, we ran the card against its predecessor, the GTX 1060. We did this by using the built-in benchmark inside Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR) which was released last year.
Even though SoTR is one of RTX-supported title, the game has yet to receive its RTX patch. Hence, what you are looking here are pretty much the raw performance from both cards at 1080p and 1440p resolution:
SYNTHETIC BENCHMARK
We also ran the RTX 2060 on two popular synthetic benchmarks to further check out the amount of performance that is contained within the card:
A FIESTY MID-RANGE CARD
As far as our first impression goes, we feel that we are looking at one feisty mid-range card here. When compared with its predecessor, the GTX 1060, the RTX 2060 has clear performance advantage with more than 60% of improvements although it is still a little bit early for us to come out with our conclusion since we have only tried one particular game on it.
We are certainly eager to put it to the test not only through more games but also against higher-end cards within both the GTX 10 and RTX 20 families. Not to forget, there is also a question regarding its ray-tracing capability as well, so stick around for our full review of the new RTX 2060 coming your way very soon.
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