March 29, 2024

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 15th, 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 Cores1920128019202304
ROPs48?486464
Core Clock1365MHz1506MHz1506MHz1410MHz
Boost Clock1680MHz1709MHz1683MHz1620MHz
FE: 1710MHz
Memory Clock14Gbps GDDR68Gbps GDDR58Gbps GDDR514Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus Width192-bit192-bit256-bit256-bit
VRAM6GB6GB8GB8GB
Single Precision Perf.6.5 TFLOPS4.4 TFLOPs6.5 TFLOPS7.5 TFLOPs
FE: 7.9 TFLOPS
“RTX-OPS”37TN/AN/A45T
SLI SupportNoNoYesNo
TDP160W120W150W175W
FE: 185W
GPUTU106?GP106GP104TU106
ArchitectureTuringPascalPascalTuring
Manufacturing ProcessTSMC 12nm “FFN”TSMC 16nmTSMC 16nmTSMC 12nm “FFN”
Launch Date1/15/20197/19/20166/10/201610/17/2018
Launch Price$349MSRP: $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.