RTX 2060 Announced : $350 'Mainstream' RTX Card

NVIDIA has announced the next member of the GeForce RTX video card family: the GeForce RTX 2060. Designed to offer performance around the outgoing GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, the new card will hit the streets next week on January 15^th, with prices starting at $349.

The GeForce RTX 2060 sports 1920 CUDA cores, meaning we’re looking at a 30 SM configuration, versus RTX 2070’s 36 SMs. As the core architecture of Turing is designed to scale with the number of SMs, this means that all of the core compute features are being scaled down similarly, so the 17% drop in SMs means a 17% drop in the RT Core count, a 17% drop in the tensor core count, a 17% drop in the texture unit count, a 17% drop in L0/L1 caches, etc.

	RTX 2060 Founders Edition	GTX 1060 6GB	GTX 1070	RTX 2070
CUDA Cores	1920	1280	1920	2304
ROPs	48?	48	64	64
Core Clock	1365MHz	1506MHz	1506MHz	1410MHz
Boost Clock	1680MHz	1709MHz	1683MHz	1620MHz FE: 1710MHz
Memory Clock	14Gbps GDDR6	8Gbps GDDR5	8Gbps GDDR5	14Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus Width	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit
VRAM	6GB	6GB	8GB	8GB
Single Precision Perf.	6.5 TFLOPS	4.4 TFLOPs	6.5 TFLOPS	7.5 TFLOPs FE: 7.9 TFLOPS
“RTX-OPS”	37T	N/A	N/A	45T
SLI Support	No	No	Yes	No
TDP	160W	120W	150W	175W FE: 185W
GPU	TU106?	GP106	GP104	TU106
Architecture	Turing	Pascal	Pascal	Turing
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 12nm “FFN”
Launch Date	1/15/2019	7/19/2016	6/10/2016	10/17/2018
Launch Price	$349	MSRP: $249 FE: $299	MSRP: $379 FE: $449	MSRP: $499 FE: $599

The card is shipping with just 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM, as opposed to 8GB on its bigger brother. The result of this is that NVIDIA is not populating 2 of TU106’s 8 memory controllers, resulting in a 192-bit memory bus and meaning that with the use of 14Gbps GDDR6, RTX 2060 only offers 75% of the memory bandwidth of the RTX 2070. Or to put this in numbers, the RTX 2060 will offer 336GB/sec of bandwidth to the RTX 2070’s 448GB/sec.

NVIDIA is claiming that the RTX 2060 is 60 percent faster on current titles than the prior-generation GTX 1060, NVIDIA’s most popular GPU, and beats the gameplay of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. With Turing’s RT Cores and Tensor Cores, it can run Battlefield V with ray tracing at 60 frames per second.

For a limited time, gamers buying a qualifying GeForce RTX 2060, or a new desktop PC equipped with the RTX 2060, can choose to receive Anthem or Battlefield V. This bundle promotion is available in most regions around the world.

So I guess I was kind of wrong in assuming 2060 would be a non-RTX card back in September but I was not wrong about the price point. However, with only the 590 to compete against for now from AMD, Nvidia is basically replacing their Pascal cards with 1SKU lower Turing cards at the same price. A nice thing for Nvidia but not so much for you.

The RTX 2060 will be available beginning Jan. 15 in systems built by Acer, Alienware, Dell, HP and Lenovo, as well as by leading system builders worldwide.

Custom boards, including stock-clocked and factory-overclocked models, will also available starting Jan. 15 from top add-in card providers, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac.

A stock-clocked RTX 2060 Founders Edition board — designed and built by NVIDIA — will also be available on that date at www.nvidia.com.