The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB Founders Edition Review: Not Quite Mainstream
by Nate Oh on January 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTWolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled. NVIDIA Adaptive Shading was not enabled.
In summary, Wolfenstein II tends to scales well, enables high framerates with minimal CPU bottleneck, enjoys running on modern GPU architectures, and consumes VRAM like nothing else. For the Turing-based RTX 2060 (6GB), this results in outpacing the GTX 1080 as well as RX Vega 56 at 1080p/1440p. The 4K results can be deceiving; looking closer at 99th percentile framerates shows a much steeper dropoff, more likely than not to be related to the limitations of the 6GB framebuffer. We've already seen the GTX 980 and 970 struggle at even 1080p, chained by 4GB video memory.
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Retycint - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
So you think its performance level is not worthy of its price tag? In that case then you wouldn't find a single GPU on the market right now that can meet your price/performance standardspiroroadkill - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
So.. NVIDIA's back to their old ways of giving cards too little RAM. Their cards have typically had much less RAM than the ones from AMD. So the 2060 is a tiny bit faster than a 1070 Ti... But loses 2GB of VRAM. Once you start using over 6GB VRAM, the 2060 is going to lose hard to the 1070 Ti. Price is also too high. A firm "meh".mkaibear - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link
How about identifying a couple of games in which the 1070Ti "wins hard" over the 2060?I think you'll find that the 6Gb of RAM is more than enough to run games at the resolutions that the 1070Ti or 2060 excel at (1080p fast or 1440p 60Hz)
Disagree? provide me with some evidence!
prateekprakash - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
Maybe AIB partners should offer one custom rtx 2060 with 12gb vram by using 2gb gddr6 chips, that may be helpful down the road...evernessince - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
So who's going to bet this card doesn't launch at MSRP like every other Nvidia card this generation? You might as well throw away any price/performance comparison done in this article as well all know there is going to be Nvidia tax thrown on top of that price tag.If this is Nvidia's new mainstream card, I hate to see the price tag on their "budget" $200 2050.
catavalon21 - Thursday, March 7, 2019 - link
I am surprised that the answer to your question is "well, actually, many are" available at or about MSRP. The one thing I'm puzzle by, is even though the article states NVIDIA will sell their own cards (as they have and do for many other models), I haven't seen one listed on NVIDIA's site (other than linking to AIB cards) since day one.catavalon21 - Thursday, March 7, 2019 - link
*puzzled* - need more coffeeoverseer - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
My sense tells me that RTX 2000 series will be a short-lived line, and NV shall come up with the next-gen (be it called 3000 series or not) on 7nm later this year. Why bother buying a half-node-like card now?sing_electric - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
Well, people who are building now, for one. There's still a lot of people who were put off upgrades when mining shot prices through the roof; this is a new entry that's significantly faster than say, $200 cards.Having said that, I tend to agree with you: 7nm will probably offer significantly better performance, and if you care about raytracing, it's really the games that *started* development after the RTX came out that will show a real benefit (instead of seeing a reflection in one pond in one part of one map or something), and those games will be coming out around the time that the next-gen RTX will anyways.
richough3 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
The reality is that this card, spec wise is a replacement of the 1070, but to call it a 2070 would show small performance increases vs calling it 2060. With it being faster than a 1070 at $30 less MSRP, it's an okay upgrade from a 1060, although I would have rather had 8+ GB RAM. I would expect the 2050 TI to have similar specs as a 1060, although with just 4 GB RAM.