Why would you even…? - Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,522 words · ~7 min read
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are you tired of gaming in boring old 4k
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well this sucks i could barely even make out the individual pixels
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how am i even gonna know it's a video game are you tired of having all that extra
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money in your wallet introducing the new rtx 2060 the more
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expensive version of the gtx 1160 we accidentally leaked a few weeks ago now
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you can play all your compatible games at half the frame rate
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buy now awesome
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all kidding aside we've been pretty negative about product releases from
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NVIDIA lately and while it's good to get our frustrations out every once in a
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while it gets pretty boring if everything is crap you know so for this
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review i'm going to give the rtx 2060 every
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chance i can for it to impress me and i'm gonna try not to think too much
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about my problems with the rest of the rtx launches
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and that should be pretty easy on paper this
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thing actually has a lot going for it compared to the gtx 1060 it's got more
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cuda cores and way faster memory uh that
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is depending on which version of the card you get more on that later and
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that's to say nothing of the inclusion of the usb type-c based virtual link
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connector in fact the rtx 2060 looks
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more like a beefed up gtx 1070
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which is great because it's priced that way too okay all right sorry i'm letting
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a little bit of salt seep in here but at 3 49 NVIDIA's newest real-time ray
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tracing accelerator is a cool hondo more
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than its direct predecessor 60 tier card
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anywho like the gtx 1070 we are down to
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one 8-pin pci express power connector and while our founders edition is still
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rocking the new rtx style dual fan cooler design we're treated to a smaller
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lighter card overall that on the surface looks a lot friendlier to small form
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factors than his bigger brothers in practice though this shorter pcb
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design ends up being less helpful than you'd think thanks to the rear position
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of the pci express power connector bummer
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partner boards don't have to end up that way though so all that really matters
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about our founders edition is how it performs
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since launching two uproarious applause rtx ray tracing and deep learning super
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sampling anti-aliasing have been hot new features announced for dozens of games
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so we should have plenty to look at now that it's been on the market for several
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months
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rats that was more salt there wasn't it but it's okay it's okay at least we have
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something to look at now the shadow of the tomb raider team's only birthday
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present to me ended up being empty promises but battlefield 5 and final
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fantasy xv respectively had support for these features though a new card
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supporting them doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know our FPS is
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roughly halved for the privilege of turning rtx on which in this case
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unfortunately takes a GPU that is capable of playable frame rates at 4k
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medium settings and drops us to 1080p is
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the difference between 1080p and 4k that noticeable
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maybe not so much like we're really in the heat of battle but as we discussed
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in our recent video on resolution versus frame rate the inability to run at
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greater than 60 FPS is going to put you at a competitive disadvantage in
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competitive games and that difference in resolution is noticeable in sightseeing
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titles as for dlss it performs pretty
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well but it's locked at 4k
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which means that this card translates to a passable score in the final fantasy 15
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benchmark it's not a great benchmark but it does show us a pretty representative
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performance difference between taa and dlss
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now whether or not you like the lss anyway and the shimmering that it
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retains on thin edges versus taa that's another story on to more
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traditional gaming scenarios the rtx 2060 runs significantly faster than the
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gtx 1070 a pretty solid place to be
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considering its similar specs and launch price directx 12 in particular
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exemplifies the improvements to asynchronous compute that turing brings
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to the table and as a result we've got a decent uplift pretty much across the
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board and the rtx 2060s prospects improve even
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further in our productivity suite where it beats out the gtx 1070 by a
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significant margin in luxmark and for that matter actually most workstation
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tasks budget workstation use actually might be
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this card's calling especially when you look at its performance across all but
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one test in specuperf now while we didn't run any deep
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learning tests today armchair ai researchers should directly benefit from
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the tensor course and the fact that the GeForce rtx 2060 is the cheapest card
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that has them it should come as no surprise though but with all this tech
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packed into it power consumption is up along with thermal output showing us
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exactly why the card still rocks the
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dense fin arrangement and dual fan cooler design it's not terrible though
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because the thing about power and thermals is that you always have to look
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at it relatively and AMD's closest
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performance competitor vega isn't even in the same ballpark
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helping matters further partner cards will probably have some interesting
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board layouts and cooling solutions that should make this a very versatile little
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GPU with all of that in mind
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who exactly is the rtx 2064 well at risk
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of sounding negative for the life of me i can't think of a reason to use its
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premiere feature you know the one that's printed several times on the card
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i mean even at medium settings it still
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halves your frame rate which is unacceptable for a competitive shooter
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like battlefield 5 especially if you use a high refresh rate monitor
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and yes dlss is faster than taa but that
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assumes that a 6 gig card can run future
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supported games in 4k well enough to even use the feature
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as for traditional rendering well it's faster than a gtx 1070 at a similar
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launch price but then you're paying a hundred dollar
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premium on a 60 series card compared to
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the previous 60 series anyway just for the privilege of that rtx badge that
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you're not using so the real conclusion here seems to be the one that we haven't
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been given the information to draw and that's that you should buy the rumored
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upcoming rtx list gtx 1160 that was
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leaked with otherwise identical specs
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now workstation performance seems really promising at first but the 1160 should
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come with the same benefits there as well unless you're into deep learning
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which leaves us today then with a card that occupies a tidy little
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decent gaming and also light workstation use niche until NVIDIA undermines its
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own product with a lower priced alternative so
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buy it quickly then to ensure that it's not irrelevant by the time it arrives oh
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but buy the right version because rumor has it there's three different memory
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configurations across three different capacities so
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