Nvidia has unveiled its mainstream RTX 2060 graphics cards that, it claims, offers support for ray-tracing technology in games, with a retail price of around $349 or £329 in the UK. GTX 2060 cards from the usual OEM should be even cheaper – £300 or less.
The new card was launched on Sunday on the first day of the CES 2019 trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
| Technical specifications | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Turing |
| CUDA cores | 1920 |
| Base clock | 1365MHz |
| Boost clock | 1680MHz |
| Giga Rays | Five |
| Memory speed | 16Gbps |
| Standard memory | 6GB, GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth | 192-bit, 336GB/s |
| Max resolution | 7680×4320 |
| Monitor support | Four |
| Max temp | 88 degrees celsius |
| Power requirement | 160W |
| Recommended PSU | 500W |
| Power connectors | 8 pin |
The new card packs 1,920 CUDA cores compared to the 2,304 the more powerful RTX 2070 has on offer. It also comes with 6GB of GDDR6 memory and 240 Tensor Cores that can deliver 52 teraflops of processing power, and five GigaRays per second of ray-tracing performance.
At the launch, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated the card running Battlefield V with real-time ray tracing and 60fps at 1440p. Huang also showed off a series of benchmarks, showing the RTX 2060 outperforming AMD’s Radeon RX 590 by 22 per cent, although the RTX 1060 is around £100 more expensive.
“Next-gen gaming starts today for tens of millions of gamers everywhere,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
“Desktop gamers are demanding, and the RTX 2060 sets a new standard — an unbeatable price, extraordinary performance and real-time ray tracing that blurs the distinction between movies and games. This is a great moment for gamers and our industry.”
Nvidia has also, effectively, waved the white flag over its proprietary (and expensive) G-Sync technology, updating drivers to enable Nvidia graphics cards to adopt FreeSync.
G-Sync and FreeSync were developed by Nvidia and AMD respectively to synchronise refresh rates between graphics card and monitor. The aim of both technologies is to reduce screen tearing and stuttering.
However, hardware-based G-Sync adds between £150 and £200 to the price of a monitor, while AMD’s FreeSync uses the standard DisplayPort Adaptive Sync protocols to do the same thing and is radically cheaper.
FreeSync has also been adopted by Intel, which is planning to release its own discrete graphics card range in 2020.