GeForce RTX 2060 Review – Ray tracing for the masses at $349

NVIDIA released the RTX 2060 at CES 2019, which finally made ray-tracing accessible at a much more affordable price. They unveiled the RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti GPUs earlier which featured real-time ray-tracing, which brought much more realistic reflections and shadows to games.

Pricing & Availability

The RTX 2060 is priced at $349 in the US, and at around 31,000 INR in India. The pricing is marginally lower than the higher end RTX 2070 which costs around $600 but has the same features with lower performance. But here’s the thing – the GTX 1660 Ti has almost the same performance at $279! We’ll determine which card is better in the performance benchmarks.

The GPU is available through many retailers like Amazon and Newegg in the US. In India, you’ll be able to buy it through many retailers like MDComputers and Amazon India.

Disclosure – Some of the buying links mentioned are affiliate links, meaning that at no extra cost, a percentage of the sale goes towards supporting us.

Turing Architecture with Real-Time Ray Tracing

The RTX 2060 succeeds the GTX 1060 with lots of new features, made possible by the new Turing Architecture. The GPU is based on a 12nm manufacturing process and has RT Cores that enable the ray tracing functionality in games, but it’s not very mainstream yet. Apart from Ray Tracing, the Turing Architecture also brings DLSS & NV-Link to the table.

Ray-Tracing is definitely very impressive but needs time to mature and become mainstream.

No one can say for sure how important ray-tracing will become down the line, but NVIDIA’s recent advancements point towards a bright future for ray-tracing. If you want to future-proof your GPU, the RTX 2060 is the one to buy. But if you don’t care about ray-tracing all that much, definitely go for the GTX 1660 Ti instead.

Performance Benchmarks & Comparision

The RTX 2060 is a phenomenal performer at 1440p Ultra and performs consistently at over 60FPS across many AAA titles. Some unoptimized titles could give you trouble, but it’s not a problem if you drop down some of the settings to High instead. It’s almost overkill for 1080p, but you could enjoy some great high refresh rate gaming at medium to high settings.

As for Ray Tracing, the RTX 2060 performs at around 65-80FPS in Battlefield V at 1080p Ultra, DXR Reflections set to Medium, and DLSS on. Similar performance is present on Metro Exodus, another title which supports ray tracing. But, DLSS doesn’t look that great right now. Here’s a video by Science Studio that explains DLSS in depth.

So is the experience in Ray Tracing impressive? Not really, but there is a ton of scope for improvement.

Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS for short, is a new anti-aliasing method that uses Artifical Intelligence gives marginal performance gains over traditional anti-aliasing techniques like MSAA. But just like ray tracing, I think it’s still evolving. It doesn’t look all that great on Metro Exodus and other titles which support it. Still, when Ray Tracing was first implemented in Battlefield V, it performed horribly but after several updates, the situation is much better. 

I expect that by the end of 2019, the RTX Platform will have developed really well and the RTX 2060 will turn out to be a great GPU with Ray Tracing & DLSS On. But is it worth paying $70 more over the GTX 1660 Ti for Ray-Tracing? That’s for you to decide, but like I said before if you want to futureproof your GPU definitely go for the RTX 2060. 

Ray tracing is not important yet, but could definitely be an important feature in the long run.

Thermal Performance on the RTX 2060 is pretty good. The card has a TDP of 160W and depending on which variant you get, at stock settings, the GPU performs under 70C at load. There’s a great room for overclocking in the higher end models like ASUS Strix, MSI Gaming X Trio, and ZOTAC AMP Edition.