NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB Video Card Review
RTX 2060 – Turing For The Masses
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has arrived and promises to bring Turing GPU performance and features to mainstream gamers. With a price of $349 for the RTX 2060 Founders Edition and partner cards, this card is poised to be one of the most popular models for 2019.
NVIDIA touts the GeForce RTX 2060 as delivering performance close to last generations GeForce GTX 1080 with the addition of real-time ray tracing and AI hardware. The RTX 2060 has 30 RT Cores, which is just six less than the $549 RTX 2070 that are capable of delivering 5 Giga Rays of ray tracing performance. That is enough power to get almost 60 FPS at 1080p on Battlefield V with all Ultra settings set across the board.
Under the hood, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is based on the Turing TU106 GPU with 10.8 Billion transistors. This is the same GPU that is used on the RTX 2070, with a number of things disabled. The RTX 2060 has 1920 CUDA cores, which is a 17% reduction from RTX 2070. It also has 30 RT cores and 240 Tensor cores for a reduction of 17% on each of those as well. NVIDIA clocked the 2060 FE slightly slower as well with clock speeds of 1365 MHz base and 1680 MHz boost.
NVIDIA is using 6GB of GDDR6 memory on the RTX 2060 Founders Edition card on a narrower 192-bit memory bus at 14Gbps for 336.1 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is a 25% reduction in memory bandwidth from the RTX 2070 FE. So, you are looking at 17% fewer cores, 25% less memory bandwidth and a 3% lower base clock for the RTX 2060. That doesn’t sound good, but the price tag on the RTX 2060 FE is 42% lower than that of the RTX 2070 FE. NVIDIA also has an RTX 2060 promotional game bundle where buyers get a copy of Anthem or Battlefield V for free.
| RTX 2080 Ti FE | RTX 2080 FE | RTX 2070 FE | RTX 2060 FE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | TU102 | TU104 | TU106 | TU106 |
| GPU Cores | 4352 | 2944 | 2304 | 1920 |
| Base Clock | 1350 MHz | 1515 MHz | 1410 MHz | 1365 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1545 MHz/1635 MHz | 1710 MHz/1800 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1680 MHz |
| Texture Units | 272 | 184 | 144 | 120 |
| ROP Units | 88 | 64 | 64 | 48 |
| RT Cores | 68 | 46 | 36 | 30 |
| Tensor Cores | 544 | 368 | 288 | 240 |
| Ray Tracing Speed | 10 GRays/s | 8 GRays/s | 6 GRays/s | 5 GRays/s |
| Memory | 11GB | 8GB | 8GB | 6GB |
| Memory Clock | 14000 MHz | 14000 MHz | 14000 MHz | 14000 MHz |
| Memory Interface | 352-bit G6 | 256-bit G6 | 256-bit G6 | 192-bit G6 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 616 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 448GB/s | 336.1 GB/s |
| TDP | 260 W | 225W | 185 watts | 160 watts |
| Peak Compute (FP32) | 13.4 TFLOPS / 14.2 TFLOP | 10 TFLOPS / 10.6 TFLOPS (FE) | 7.9 TFLOPS | 6.5 TFLOPS |
| Transistor Count | 18.6 B | 13.6 B | 10.8 B | 10.8 B |
| Process Tech | 12nm | 12nm | 12nm | 12nm |
| MSRP (current) | $1199 | $800 | $599 | $349 |
The GeForce RTX 2060 FE looks like most of the other Founders Edition models albiet it just smaller. This dual-slot card measures in at just 9.0-inches!
When it comes to power connectors, the GeForce RTX 2060 FE has one 8-pin PCIe power connector that is located at the end of the card. The power connector is connected to the main PCB with electrical wire, which is a little different from the traditional solid metal connections.
The back of the RTX 2060 FE has a stylized full coverage back plate that looks good and also protects the back of the PCB. On the PCB you can see that the RTX 2060 FE has a 6-phase power design for the GPU with a 2-phase power design for the 6GB of Samsung GDDR6 memory found on the reference card.
When it comes to display support there are two DisplayPort 1.4,one HDMI 2.0b connector, one DVI and one VirtualLink port (USB Type-C) connectors. The VirtualLink port provides four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectivity, as well as 27W of power delivery.
Here is a quick look at GPU-Z 2.16.0 that shows the details of the GeForce RTX 2060 FE that we have in-house for testing.
Let’s take a look at the test system and then see the benchmarks!