Introduction

NVIDIA at its rather brief CES 2019 GeForce Update event announced what is perhaps the least glamorous yet most important graphics card for the company's bottom-line, the GeForce RTX 2060. Priced at a suggested retail price of $349, this is the graphics card most PC gamers are likely to buy this generation owing purely to its price. It succeeds the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB, but is being launched at a $100 higher price.

The RTX 2060 was rumored to come in half a dozen sub-variants based on memory size and type, although in the end, NVIDIA only launched the top-spec varient with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. Perhaps, NVIDIA is saving the other SKUs up for when its GTX 1060 inventories are sufficiently off the shelves and spring-summer sets in.

NVIDIA carved the RTX 2060 out from the same silicon as the RTX 2070, the 12 nm Turing "TU106." This means you very much do get RT cores and Tensor cores, and NVIDIA wants you to enjoy real-time ray-traced gaming with this card, particularly with RTX enabled, and NVIDIA's ambitious new image-quality innovation, DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling).



The RTX 2060 is equipped with 1,920 CUDA cores, which is a huge step up from the GTX 1060 6 GB (1,280), spread across 30 out of 36 streaming multiprocessors on the "TU106." You hence get 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores. NVIDIA narrowed the memory bus width of this chip down to 192-bit and equipped it with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps, resulting in 336 GB/s of memory bandwidth (roughly on par with that of a GTX 980 Ti).

NVIDIA in its CES 2019 unveil of this card focused on this card's 1440p performance, which roughly gives us an idea of what the company wants this card to do. It wants to bring about 1440p RTX-on gaming as the new mainstream option, and wants people to step up from 1080p.

In this review, we test the de facto reference-design RTX 2060 Founders Edition card by NVIDIA. The card looks and feels similar to the RTX 2070 Founders Edition because it's largely based on the same PCB and cooler.