Ever since Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 came out in 2016, it’s not only been the de facto, bestest best graphics card for flawless 1080p gaming, but also the go-to GPU for cash-strapped 1440p-ers, offering smooth, if slightly less shiny, frame rates for a much lower price than Nvidia’s more capable GTX 1070 or GTX 1070Ti. It was a fantastic card when it launched for $249, and it continues to be one now for even less, with some of today’s cheapest 6GB cards going for $240 / £220.
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Its RTX 2060 successor, however, kicks things up a notch. It’s another £100 / $100 more expensive than the GTX 1060, with Nvidia’s Founders Edition on test here going for £329 / $349 while third party cards currently start at £350 / $350, but when it comes to speed, it’s in another league altogether. Whereas the GTX 1060 struggled to hit 60fps on higher quality settings at 1440p, the RTX 2060 sails past that number and then some. It can even push into the realms of 4K without throwing a hissy-fit. In truth, this is what today’s GTX 1070 owners should be looking to for their next upgrade, because this, dear readers, is one seriously powerful graphics card that goes way beyond what we’d normally call ‘mid-range’.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see now why AMD squeaked out their Radeon RX 590 graphics card at the tail end of last year without even a whiff of ceremony about it, because when it comes to stonking 1440p performance, the RTX 2060 utterly wipes the floor with it. The RX 590 is, admittedly, still a lot cheaper than the RTX 2060 (with most cards going for the same price as Nvidia’s 6GB GTX 1060 at time of writing), and offers a smidge more performance than both its GTX rival and RX 580 predecessor. But I can’t help think that if AMD had decided to release the RX 590 after the RTX 2060, it probably would have been dismissed within 3.87 seconds of its untimely arrival.
Thankfully, AMD didn’t do that, and the RX 590’s reasonably-sort-of sane pricing means it will continue to have a place among the budget 1440p graphics cards of this world if you can’t stump up the cash for the RTX 2060.
If anything, it’s Nvidia’s own GTX 1070 and GTX 1070Ti that should be worried, as the RTX 2060 effectively makes both of them redundant – and, in the case of the GTX 1070Ti, at a much lower price to boot.
You get two DisplayPort 1.4a ready outputs on the RTX 2006, as well as one HDMI 2.0, one USB-C, and one DVI-DL.
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So what are you actually getting with the RTX 2060? That’s right. It’s numbers time – although some of these figures may vary if you decide to get one of the third party cards instead of the Nvidia Founders Edition I’ve got here. Regardless of which card you buy, though, every RTX 2060 comes with 6GB of super fast GDDR6 memory clocked at 14Gbps, as well as 1920 CUDA cores (or processing units, if you like to keep things simple). The latter is actually the same number you’ll find in Nvidia’s GTX 1070, and a whole 640 more than what you’ll find on the 6GB GTX 1060.
But wait a minute, I hear you cry, doesn’t the GTX 1070 have 8GB of memory? How is the RTX 2060 faster? Well, a lot of that’s down to the RTX 2060’s nippier memory, which lets it chew through data at a much higher rate – 336GB/s worth, to be precise, compared to just 256GB/s on the GTX 1070 and its Ti counterpart. And as we’ll see in just a second, this gives it better overall performance despite the fact it only has 6GB of the stuff as opposed to the 8GB of GDDR5 memory you’ll find on the GTX 1070 and GTX 1070Ti.
That’s pretty impressive considering the RTX 2060’s GPU also has lower base and boost clock speeds than Nvidia’s GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 families, with its base coming in at just 1365MHz, while its boost tops out at 1680MHz. These numbers may well be slightly higher on other third party cards out there that have been overclocked straight out of the factory, but the fact remains that the RTX 2060 pulls some serious weight in spite of its slower-running GPU.
Let’s talk frame rates then – or at least the kind of frame rates you can expect when you pair it with an Intel Core i5-8600K and 16GB of RAM like I did. At 1080p, you’re absolutely laughing with the RTX 2060, as it ploughed through almost every game in my testing suite at a breezy minimum of at least 70fps, if not 75fps in a lot of cases, on maximum quality settings. That includes Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Warhammer II, Monster Hunter: World and The Witcher III. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey had to make do with ‘just’ 60fps on Ultra High when I ran its internal benchmark, all told, but was quickly back up at 71fps on the next setting down, which is still Very High. Doom and Forza Horizon 4, meanwhile, were dashing off averages closer to 100 / 120fps on their respective Ultra settings, making this the perfect partner for a high refresh rate 1920×1080 monitor (which you should totally have a look at in our best gaming monitor guide if you don’t already have one).
You’ll need an 8-pin power connector for the RTX 2060, but at least the recommended power supply wattage is only 500W this time.
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The only game where it dipped below that hallowed 60fps at 1080p was, you guessed it, Final Fantasy XV. Here, you’re looking at an average of around 55fps, with the occasional low of 40fps, but that’s with everything whacked up to eleven, including all of Nvidia’s fancy pants lighting effects. Disable VXAO and you’ll be back up at a full 60fps+ in no time at all.