NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition Review

NVIDIA announced their “budget” GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card at CES for a price of $349, claiming performance on par with the GTX 1080 along with the perks of Turing included. NVIDIA’s own benchmarks put the 2060 hot on the heels of the 1080 with an overclock possibly closing the gap. Today, we are reviewing the RTX 2060 Founders Edition and see how it performs as a mid-range SKU and whether raytracing is practical with Turing junior at 1080p.

Testbench

Let’s go over the testbench once. We tested the GeForce RTX 2060 on an Asus Maximus Hero IX with an Intel Core i7-7700K paired with 16 GB DDR4 2400 MHz HyperX RAM.

GeForce RTX 2060 Benchmarks @ 1080p

Game	2060	1080	1070 Ti	2070
AC: Odyssey	75	75	73	84
DX: M.Divided	69	76	68	72
Wildlands	56	60	59	62
FFXV	90	86	88	97
Hellblade	85	88	80	104
TW3	82	83	79	94
KCD	88	89	88	91
BFV	100	104	96	106

GeForce RTX 2060 Benchmarks @ 1440p

Game	2060	1080	1070 Ti	2070
AC: Odyssey	61	62	57	71
DX: M.Divided	48	50	46	53
Wildlands	46	47	42	49
FFXV	63	62	61	68
Hellblade	67	68	63	76
TW3	52	50	48	60
KCD	57	57	56	59
BFV	80	80	76	85

GeForce RTX 2060 Benchmarks @ 2160p

Game	2060	1080	1070 Ti	2070
AC: Odyssey	39	39	36	43
DX: M.Divided	25	26	24	28
Wildlands	28	29	27	30
FFXV	32	33	30	37
Hellblade	32	33	32	41
TW3	32	31	27	35
KCD	28	28	27	31
BFV	36	46	42	50

Performance Analysis

Looking at the numbers, it can be easily concluded that the GeForce RTX 2060 isn’t suited for 1080p gaming. Sure if you have a 75 Hz monitor, then it’s no biggie, but if like me, you are limited to 60 Hz, then 1440p would be our resolution of choice for Turing junior.

Furthermore, except for a handful of titles the RTX 2060 consistently performs on par with the GTX 1080. The GTX 1060 is left far behind with a delta of almost 70% in some cases. In comparison to the RTX 2070, the 2060 manages to deliver approx 90% of the former’s performance.

So, if you are used to the silky smooth experience of 60 FPS at 1440p, then the RTX 2060 is a very viable option. The card should also run most games at 4K at 30 FPS, and some compromises in visual fidelity should push it even further up to at least the forties.

Lastly, since the thermals and noise were within remarkably acceptable limits, we decided to leave those tests out. This is all thanks to NVIDIA’s new shroud which other than being aesthetic does a wonderful job of keeping the graphics card cool.

If you are interested in seeing how the card performs in Battlefield V with ray-tracing enabled or how efficient DLSS really is, come back tomorrow and we’ll have a comprehensive article ready on that by then.

Further reading:

• AMD Losing Money On The New Radeon Vega VII, To Make Less Than 5000 pieces
• Intel shoots itself in the foot with F-series CPU Pricing
• NVIDIA RTX 2060 Review: Testing DLSS and Raytracing on Turing Junior
• Overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition