by Rob Williams on January 21, 2019 in Graphics & Displays
At $349, NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 2060 becomes the most affordable in its lineup to provide Tensor and RT cores, and along with that, we also see some considerable performance boosts from generation to generation. Is that enough to justify its price tag? We’ll let the benchmarks speak for themselves.
Battlefield V
For 1080p gaming, last-gen’s GTX 1060 offers sufficient brawn, but its performance doesn’t come close to the RTX 2060. A 59 FPS result becomes 104 FPS, the kind of jump that helps NVIDIA justify the unexpected $100 price jump between generations. At 1440p, the 2060 secures 60+ FPS minimum. It’s important to note that this is offline gameplay, and that an online battlefield is undoubtedly going to be more demanding.
AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 becomes an interesting comparison here, as well. It costs at least $50 more than the RTX 2060, but falls short of its performance in BF V (which won’t be the case in all games).
We haven’t explored ray tracing benchmarking up to this point, but to be more complete for this article, we loaded up the game’s fifth mission with DXR set to Ultra. Using the same segment of the game for testing, ray tracing unsurprisingly took a gouge out of the performance:
At 1080p, the 2060’s 57 FPS is sufficient enough, but unless you want to turn down the DXR detail level, you’re going to trudge through the game at a rather paltry 38 FPS on average at 1440p. Whether the drop in resolution is worth the increase in effects is entirely based on your tastes.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
The RTX 2060 brings us great performance in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at 1080p, even though the game’s detail levels are quite high. At the higher 1440p resolution, the average frame rate drops to a still-suitable 61 FPS, with the minimum not taking too great a chip off of that. Meanwhile, AMD’s RX Vega 56 inches a bit ahead of NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 here.
F1 2018
The popular F1 game series from Codemasters looks good, and fortunately, it doesn’t require a big system to deliver satisfying performance. At max detail, NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 breaks through the 100 FPS mark at 1080p. The 1440p resolution boost doesn’t actually take that great of a toll, giving us an 81 FPS average, and a 68 FPS minimum. AMD’s RX Vega 56 again sits behind the RTX 2060 in this title.
Far Cry 5
The RTX 2060 has had no problem making the GTX 1060 look a bit weak up to this point. The performance increase from generation to generation isn’t normally as big as it is here, making this card feel more like an RTX 2060 Ti (but that could be debated).
At 1080p, even the GTX 1060 can handle Far Cry 5 at great detail without issue – but that’s a definite cut-off point. At 1440p, at least an RX 590 is needed for (nearly) 60 FPS gameplay. NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 helps bolster that further, giving us 75 FPS on average, and an 8 FPS delta between it and the minimum FPS.