NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 1080p & 1440p Gaming Performance

The performance information found in this article is outdated. We’d recommend looking through our recent GPU performance content for up-to-date results, benchmarks, and graphics cards. 

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption, a Kill-A-Watt that the PC itself is plugged into is used for monitoring a Far Cry 5 4K benchmark run. Admittedly, we don’t have the best methods for power testing, and would love to improve them in the future, but for now, we use what we have, and that’s our eyeballs. Over the course of the one-minute benchmark, a rough average is pulled. Yes, it’s boring watching a power monitor for one-minute spurts – thank you for asking.

The RTX 2060 leaped far past the GTX 1060 in performance, but the modest Pascal card can rightfully gloat about its lighter power load. That said, the 2060 can likewise gloat by delivering performance similar to the Vega 56, but for 60W less.

Final Thoughts

Let’s jump right into the most important question: is the GeForce RTX 2060 worth $349? I expected to have a hard time answering that when all was said and done, but the card’s performance impressed me. While the card did indeed jump 40% in price from one generation to the next, the performance is increased at least that much in all of our tests. It’s usually closer to 60%.

We’ve commonly expected to see similar price-points from one generation to the next. It’s meant that upgrading from one $249 GPU to the next meant you were getting a real upgrade. In this case, that upgrade becomes more significant than usual, and if we want to argue for the things NVIDIA wants us to, the 2060 retains Turing’s DXR ray tracing and DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling) capabilities.

At $1,199 for a Founders Edition, the 2080 Ti commands a massive 85% premium over the 1080 Ti’s $649. Meanwhile, the RTX 2060’s premium sits at a much more modest 40% (but it’s still not modest, to be clear). Ultimately, this card could have been $399, and it wouldn’t have surprised me. Fortunately, the RTX 2060 can actually be had for $349, including straight from NVIDIA.

The fact that the RTX 2060 includes 6GB of VRAM is worth talking about for a minute. This card manages to beat out the GTX 1070 and RX Vega 56 (at least often), and matches a GTX 1070 Ti – all of which include an 8GB framebuffer. What’s the deal? Clearly, NVIDIA didn’t want to eat too much into its RTX 2070 sales, or it just wanted to save on cost.

Realistically, I can’t imagine many people are going to fight against a 6GB limit on a graphics card that’s not catered to any resolution higher than 1440p. Games are gradually using more and more VRAM, but 6GB still seems sufficient for this card.

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060 isn’t too hard to sum up overall, since its performance, price, and features paint a proper picture of what this class card should provide. That’s outstanding performance at 1080p, and great performance at 1440p. 4K will work in select games as well, primarily MOBA-style that are not typically too demanding.

General performance expectations of the RTX 2060 based on our testing can be seen in this table:

Even though the Vega 56 is technically the faster of the two cards, the RTX 2060 keeps right up to it, often beating it out despite the synthetic performance metrics seen on paper (or even by 3DMark). Overall, both cards are still treated as equal, so the rankings in this table are identical between them.

If you want 144Hz gaming, you’re probably going to be better off with a higher-end card, although it’s not impossible with this one if you’re satisfied with 1080p. Many of the tests here hit 80~100 FPS on the 2060, so further detail reductions will help increase the FPS (bearing in mind the fact that high-IPC CPU helps out a lot with 1080p performance).

For those wondering about compute performance, the RTX 2060 will be tested in that way in the future, but there’s some other overdue testing that’s still being churned through. A certain Radeon is en route that will also need some compute testing done, so we’ll likely jump on both at around the same time.