The original GeForce RTX 2060 was marketed as a 1440p gaming card, and it does that fairly well. With just 6 GB of memory, though, it may not be too future-proof, especially when it comes to the public's perception. Some upcoming titles may lock out certain Ultra settings due to a lack of video memory. This and the fact that AMD is giving its Radeon RX 5700 the full 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory bus makes NVIDIA's position untenable. Memory is the first thing NVIDIA improved with the new RTX 2060 Super. It gets the same memory configuration as its competitor from the red team, and the $700 RTX 2080. The second design goal of NVIDIA would have been to increase performance without cannibalizing the original RTX 2070. We hence see the CUDA core count set at 2,176, just one TPC short of the full "TU106" silicon of the RTX 2070. The GPU clock speeds get an improvement, though.

With these hardware changes, the RTX 2060 Super is significantly faster than the original RTX 2060 without beating the original RTX 2070. It gets danger-close, though. At 1080p, the card is 10% faster than the original RTX 2060, and 12% faster at 1440p. The gap increases to 13% at 4K, and although not its forte, quite a few games in our bench are playable with this card at that resolution. It's hard to say just how much of a dividend the 33% faster and larger memory setup pays, but it could certainly do wonders for the card's future-proofing, especially when you take into account memory sizes on future consoles. Across the competitive landscape, the RX Vega 64 is the closest AMD card to the RTX 2060 Super, and it trails behind the RTX 2060 Super by 11% across all resolutions. This landscape will probably change when AMD formally launches the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT next week.

The power characteristics of the RTX 2060 Super are predictable and seem to scale up linearly with performance. Average gaming power draw is up to 184 W compared to the 164 W of the original RTX 2060, and peak gaming power is up to 192 W from 170 W. The Founders Edition cooling solution does a good job at keeping temperatures low, with idle temperatures in the mid-30s and load temperatures in the mid-70s, seldom close to the thermal-throttling point. Fan noise is closer to that of the RTX 2070 at 30 dBA, which makes sense since it's based on the same exact board design. Our only gripe with this cooler is the lack of the idle-fan-stop feature. However, we expect many custom-design cards to feature it.

Overclocking the RTX 2060 Super is a breeze, with a massive 29 percent GPU overclock (+200 MHz) without tinkering with the voltages and an easy-peasy memory overclock to 16 Gbps. It's astonishingly easy to get this card up to RTX 2070 performance levels, which is probably why we hear rumors of NVIDIA retiring the RTX 2070 from its product stack. What the RTX 2060 Super doesn't do, however, is replace the RTX 2060 at $349. It instead comes at a $50 premium, which is probably NVIDIA's attempt at offseting the cost of more memory chips and stronger VRM solutions. Unless NVIDIA cuts prices of the original RTX 2060, it risks the RTX 2060 Super cannibalizing not just the RTX 2070, but also the original RTX 2060. We would definitely spend the extra $50 on the Super—not just for the added performance, but also the future-proofing the added memory brings to the table.