CES 2019 | Nvidia's RTX 2060 is faster than the GTX 1070 Ti, costs only $349

Nvidia finally announced the RTX 2060 desktop GPUs together with the RTX 2000 mobility chips at CES 2019. Initially planned for late 2018, the mid-range GPU was rumored to be released without the ray tracing features from the high-end cards, but this is clearly not the case anymore. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang recognized that the mid-range xx60 series are always bringing in important chunks of profit, so the green team tried to price the new GPU as competitively as possible.

While the review embargo is still in place, we can still analyze the initial performance assessment provided by Nvidia itself, which may or may not be misleading. Huang claimed that the RTX 2060 can beat the GTX 1070 Ti, which is at least $50 more expansive at the moment. Subsequently, the RTX 2060 was presented to be 40-60% faster than the GTX 1060, which, in turn, is around $100 less expensive. According to Nvidia’s benchmarks that, again, may or may not be accurate, the RTX 2060 is 40% faster than the GTX 1060 in Hitman and Doom 2016, 50% faster in Sniper Elite 4 and Battlefront II and more than 60% faster in Black Ops 2 and Wolfenstein II.

The green team did not care to disclose the full specs for the RTX 2060 GPU. Nvidia is expected to release the full spec sheet once the review embargo is lifted. For now, we know that the GPU will be accompanied by 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM and is capable of delivering 5 gigarays/s thanks to its 52T Tensor FLOPs throughput. This would allow the mid-range GPU to run Battlefield V on low settings with ray tracing features activated at around 60 fps.

This sounds like great news for gamers looking for the best price/performance ratio, but we need to see actual benchmarks, not some cherry-picked info that could very well turn out to be just marketing hype. Nvidia’s RTX 2060 GPUs are expected to become available on January 15 for US$349. The card bundles will include a free copy of Battlefield V or Anthem (releases in February), two games that support Nvidia’s RTX features.

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