Why is there no Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q? The new GTX 1660 Ti may be responsible

The Nvidia Pascal Max-Q series officially consists of the GTX 1050 Max-Q, GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q, GTX 1060 Max-Q, GTX 1070 Max-Q, and GTX 1080 Max-Q. As of this writing, the Nvidia Turing Max-Q series officially consists of the GTX 1650 Max-Q, GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q, RTX 2070 Max-Q and RTX 2080 Max-Q. So, where has the RTX 2060 Max-Q gone?

Nvidia is remaining tight-lipped on the whereabouts of the supposed RTX 2060 Max-Q, but we have our suspicions as to why such a GPU has yet to come to fruition. More specifically, the recent launch of the Turing GTX 16 series for laptops gives us clues as to why the RTX 2060 Max-Q may not even be necessary. Early performance results of the mobile GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti as shown below suggest that these two GPUs are essentially performing at where we expect the RTX 2060 Max-Q would be. In other words, the RTX 2060 Max-Q already exists as the GTX 1660 Ti albeit without the ray-tracing or DLSS features.

When looking at the 3DMark results, a GTX 1060 Max-Q is slower than a standard mobile GTX 1060 by just a few percentage points and the same can be observed between the RTX 2060 and GTX 1660 Ti. Even if the RTX 2060 Max-Q were to be slower than the GTX 1660 Ti, the planned GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q will further diminish the need for an RTX 2060 Max-Q.

The biggest reason for offering an RTX 2060 Max-Q option is subsequently for its ray-tracing and DLSS capabilities. The problem, however, is that these advanced features require an already beefy GPU to be useful in the first place. Nvidia may have determined that the RTX 2060 Max-Q would not be up to its performance standards to show off RT or DLSS at acceptable frame rates.

Of course, Nvidia may still launch the RTX 2060 Max-Q in the near future to prove us wrong, but it would indubitably have a hard time competing against the already price-aggressive GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti in both performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt.