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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zepi - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
Watching with disgust due to high power usage and noise. I won't upgrade to something that sounds as bad as my current AMD card.eva02langley - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
HBM2 and GDDR6 are fairly at the same price even without the actual numbers. GDDR6 is 70% more expensive than the GDDR5.But yeah, Koduri mistake was to push HBM2 on Vega, it should have been GDDR5 or GDDR5x.
CiccioB - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
This legend that HBM costs like the other kind of memory is in place since people stated that HBM cost like GDDR5 (then it was against the lowly available GDDR5Xm produced only by Micron) and that using it against 12 chip of GDDR5/X/6 and the complexity needed for the PCB layout to handle them was almost the same.Unfortunatelty nothing of this is true.
HBM costs more per chip (and by GB) by itself for its construction that requires a high end process for stacking up all those layers.
Moreover, it requires a big silicon interposer that is expensive enough to cover the cost of any GDDRn memory type based PCB.
Third it requires a different path for mounting and aligning it on the interposer that is also an expensive procedure (see the problems AMD encountered for it) and that can't be done in the AIB fabs where GDDRn chips are usually mounted and soldered for 0,01$ each chip.
What AMD fanboys constantly states is their hope that AMD is not going to loose so much money for any Vega that they are selling. Unfortunately, they are, and this new video card by nvidia will make even more hard pressure on Vega as we already have announcements of further price cuts on such an expensive piece of crap that can't compete with anything in any market it has been presented and has required the constant price cut even before it was launched. In fact Vega FE cards started discounted by $200 at day one with respect to the former announced MSRP price... what a marvelous debut!
Ratman6161 - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
Totally beaten in raw performance, yes. But I don't want it anywhere near badly enough to pay $349 for it. What you can actually buy for what I would be willing to spend is the Rx580 or GTX1060 at under $200.mapesdhs - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
zepi, if all one wants is normal 1080p gaming then an RX 580 is a much better buy, especially used. Mine only cost 138 UKP. The real joke here is the price hiking of the entire midraange segment. The 2060 is what should have been the 2050. People are paying almost double for no real speed upgrade compared to two years ago at the next teir up (which should have been what the 2070 is now). Tech sites know this, some talked about it early on, but now they've all caved in to the new 2x higher pricing schema, the only exception being Paul at "not an apple fan" who continues to point out this nonense. If people go ahead and buy these products then the prices will keep going up. And AMD will follow suit, they'd be mad not to from a business standpoint.Opencg - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
I would not expect the 2060 to be anywhere near msrp considering its the only turing card with a reasonable msrp/performance ratio the demand will be high. And we all know what happens when demand is high.Bluescreendeath - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
@Benedict, Did you even read the article? The GTX2060 is more than 50% faster than the RX580 and the GTX1060. Furthermore, the GTX1060 6GBs cost around the same as the RX580 - the 1060 is not "much more expensive."mapesdhs - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Feel free to spend 100% more than what x60 cards used to cost, for a performance level that should be the tier below, but don't complain when the prices get hiked again because consumers keep buying this ripoff junk.kpb321 - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
If you want the best price/performance you need to go a little bit lower than the 580. The 570's have been ~$130 AR pretty regularly with a couple dips below that. Personally, I picked up an 8gb 570 for $190 with three stacked rebates/GCs for a total of $90 off bringing the cost of the card down to $100. I also sold off my old video card and one of the games from the bundle for another $50 bringing my upgrade cost down to ~$50. I had been wanting to upgrade for a while and was hoping for a 580 or a 1060 3gb or 6gb but the 570 looked like such a good deal I couldn't resist. Yes it was quite a bit of rebates but at this point I've gotten all of them so that is my final AR cost. Granted this even further down the performance curve but a 8gb 570 is certainly going to be a lot better than %50 of the performance of an 8gb 580 but that's what I paid for mine.zaza - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
the rx 570 can be found for 140$-150$ now and comes with your choice of 2 games out of three (unreleased games) (devil may cry, divison 2 and Resident evil 2 remake). for that price i think fir 570 is best GPU for the price, great for 1080p gaming.