We rarely look at graphics card variants on Digital Foundry, but for EVGA's RTX 2060 KO, we will make an exception. Nvidia's entry-level, full-featured Turing card has been sold for $ 349 for quite some time-when the significantly superior RTX 2060 Super is only $ 50 or more, touchscreen prices can be high. However, with the new EVGA KO model priced at $ 299, it's time to re-evaluate the product, especially the card's ability to process games using hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
First, it's the RTX aspect of 2060 that sets it apart from recent AMD rivals RX 5600 XT. It has the ability to take advantage of the DXR API and expand access to all the visual options available in supported games, which is clearly a good feature-and with the ray tracing of next-generation consoles confirmed, the widespread adoption of RT has become a case . No, but when. The most important thing is that the addition of Turing's tensor kernel enables 2060 to access hardware-accelerated machine learning functions, and AI-driven DLSS upgrade is the only application of this technology. All of these are in addition to standard graphics features that often exceed the RX 5600 XT, so that AMD must provide an 11-hour BIOS upgrade to bring its latest Navi version back to competition.
However, despite its well-received price and performance levels (especially recent price cuts), there is much discussion about the strength of the RTX 2060 in terms of providing full ray tracing support-perhaps rightly, the DXR-capable A wave of games. In the past, while playing RTX 2060 in Battlefield 5 with ray tracing enabled, I managed to achieve a effectively locked 1080p60 performance level-but it required some options to tweak and overclock. Most importantly, there may be a broader question to answer: Is 1080p60 actually good enough, considering that the RTX 2060 usually performs well at 1440p?
These are related issues, but perhaps equally important is the technical composition of the RTX 2060 KO version. Obviously, we have done our best to provide more aggressive pricing. Nvidia's reference model-Founders Edition-is a more luxurious product with excellent manufacturing quality, improved power output, and higher quality materials. Although the housing of KO is a decent metal back plate, it is made of plastic, but the cooler is not very sturdy. Its four-phase power output can indeed work, but it limits the overclocking potential. Ultimately, nonetheless, the main difference you will actually notice during the game is that it is louder than the founder. That was the only complaint I could object to.
But, as Steve Burke originally discovered on GamersNexus, the 2060 KO is a bit fascinating because it uses the TU104 Nvidia processor-the same processor that powers the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080. It is a supplement to 1920 in the Founders Edition's standard TU106 processor. In testing, I found that the performance was exactly the same, with one exception. As GamersNexus has discovered, the CUDA path in the Blender rendering tool provides faster performance than existing RTX 2060 cards. The amount of improvement varies depending on the complexity of the workload, but a sample demo I tested reduced rendering time by 19%.
However, in all other respects, the performance of KO is exactly the same as that of RTX 2060. The reduced power delivery system means you can't add a power slider in MSI Afterburner, which means that overclocking cannot be pushed to the maximum like other graphics cards. However, I still managed to add 120MHz to the core and 500MHz to 6GB of GDDR6 memory. The card did provide this extra performance even under power constraints, which overall increased the frame rate. It's about 5%. These are the OC settings I use in the standard Founders version, so I won't feel particularly short here. The only real deal is the noise factor: overclocking makes the graphics card louder than usual and even more cautious.
In summary, the more price-conscious RTX 2060 from EVGA can provide almost everything you want in this type of card, but it is a bit noisier than the reference design. It has the same performance as the original Founders version and also extends to ray tracing support, which is mainly why I decided to re-examine the RTX 2060 first, which brought us to a key question: Is the entry-level raytracer feature enough to provide a decent gaming experience?
This is a difficult question to answer because we still In the early stages of transitioning to the next generation of rendering technology, we have come a long way. First of all, if you intend to stick to native resolution rendering, then 1080p was and is now a natural target for DXR games on this type of product, and I really recommend you dial + 120MHz core / + 500MHz VRAM overclocking for extra performance stability . Especially the biggest problem of early DXR games is that the lowest frame rate region is much more important than average performance.
This allows you to get 1080p60 resolution in Battlefield 5 and has medium DXR as well as ultra-high level rasterization and high-quality textures-enough to get a good ray tracing experience, but it's similar to the standard non-RT version. The game is the same. DXR media provides you with a large number of RT experiences, with real-time reflection scaling between settings based on the material's roughness cutoff. The higher the magnification, the more material will show ray-traced reflections. As you might expect from the first generation of DXR games, based on later RT-supported games, the performance hit rate is somewhat high.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is another early example of DXR implementation. In fact, along with BF5, this is our first RT experience at Gamescom 2018. Its benchmark tests show that the performance of RT is not significant compared to Battlefield 5, but just the adventure of pulling from scratch shows that this is not the case. . When you add DXR presets, Tomb Raider will replace more and more rasterized shadow maps with higher quality, more realistic RT alternatives, and effectively superimpose the entire with ultra high settings The system moved to DXR, especially the leaves were time consuming on the GPU. Similarly, there are times when the RTX 2060 cannot sustain 1080p60.
The final name of the first generation of DXR I tested was Metro Exodus, which has a very beautiful ray-traced global illumination solution. Set the game to a higher global preset, while DXR is also set to higher, you can lower 1080p60 to 50s slightly in more challenging scenes. It's a pleasant experience, but the fact that a card that excels at 1440p in a standard 3D game must be rendered at 1080p to get acceptable performance is a problem for many. The RTX 2060 can provide a good ray tracing experience, but the question is whether you will be hit when standard games still look so good.
Of course, throughout the history of the game, whether it's talking about programmable pixel shaders, hardware T & L or any software-based innovation, pushing the cutting edge of graphics technology in the PC field will always bring performance costs. Found in Crysis. Nvidia's original plan was to offset most, if not all, performance degradation using tensor cores, and in most modern games, machine learning-based extensions replaced temporary anti-aliasing solutions. It was not planned. If RT has a difficult start, it will be even more difficult for DLSS. Historically, the results have changed from impressive to not very good.
The Witcher 3: Super, no haircut after AA
- RX 5500 XT 8GB
- RX 580
- GTX 1660
- RX 590
- GTX 1660 Super
- GTX 1660 titanium
- RX 5600 XT
- RX 5600 XT OC
- RTX 2060
So is the RTX 2060 sufficient for ray tracing games? Based on the results I just talked about from the first generation of games, I can understand some of the poor performance of this graphics card-but the technology is constantly improving, and recent games have shown real hope. Obviously, the more GPU features you have, the better the expected results, but the RTX 2060 is important because this is the benchmark performance level that Nvidia sets for accessing next-generation GPU features. I suspect that when the new Ampere architecture card comes out later this year, we will still have RTX 2060 performance-it will be cheaper: RTX 3050, anyone? With that in mind, I think testing RT support in the latest games on this type of hardware is as important as maximizing all the features on the RTX 2080 Ti.
DXR implementation Yes The improvements helped the RTX 2060, but I think the most fundamental leap I've seen comes from Nvidia's top-down AI upgrade solution DLSS revision. It started with Remedy & # 39; s Control, this game comes with an amazing DXR feature set- of Actually, show the game for ray tracing now. First, when running this game on the RTX 2060, the performance prospects seemed familiar. Even when paired on DXR media (reflection only) with most medium settings (consistent with the console version), performance will usually lie in the 50fps range, but may drop down to over 30
However, the revised version of DLSS that comes with Control allows you to set the internal resolution to 720p, and the algorithm can be upgraded to 1080p nicely. As a result, not only have we reached more than 60fps in almost all scenes, but RTX 2060 owners can adopt higher DXR settings and still experience smooth performance through a complete ray tracing experience, thereby obtaining the best on the market RT games. The results left a deep impression on me, and I decided to cheer: I chose 4K DLSS with 1080p base resolution, and all RT functions are still active, but the frame rate is limited to 30fps. The end result is that when running at the same frame rate, the experience still beautifully showcases DXR, but provides a sharper overall image than the Xbox One X's 1440p UHD-based output. The comparison is interesting, but the comparison library above should prove inspiring-Remedy's TAA solution does have some advantages.
Crysis 3: Very High, SMAA T2X
- RX 580
- RX 5500 XT 8GB
- GTX 1660
- RX 590
- GTX 1660 Super
- GTX 1660 titanium
- RX 5600 XT
- RX 5600 XT OC
- RTX 2060
In terms of image quality, Control's DLSS solution is good, but a recent major algorithm upgrade has changed everything. As we have already discussed in other Digital Foundry articles, the new "DLSS 2.0" is capable of delivering image quality comparable to native rendering resolution at resolutions as low as 1. Quarter resolution Basic picture. By setting Wolfenstein Youngblood to a medium setting equivalent to the console in DLSS performance mode, we upgraded the AI from 540p to 1080p, which looks as good as (if not better than) the PlayStation 4 version of the game. The performance boost of the RTX 2060 is enough to provide a great 1440p experience with ray tracing enabled-or you can redeploy DLSS with RT disabled to deliver 4K games at 80 frames per second or higher. That's not bad for a $ 299 graphics card.
This is simply a roundabout twist. The promise Nvidia made at the Gamescom 2018 conference is now closer to fulfillment, and the building blocks have been put in place to ensure that the RTX 2060 “ entry level '' ##; raytracer It is now in a better position than earlier uncertain support periods. But should you buy one? This is a tricky question. Although the price of the card is closer to the RX 2060 Super, it is very easy to save money for a more powerful card. It's faster and has an extra 2GB of memory.
In general, the GPU that is best for you is always the most expensive GPU you can afford, but nothing has changed there, but the price reduction of the RTX 2060 now makes the product a great distance from its Super sibling. With that in mind, it's a strong contender at this price level, and despite various reductions, the KO model can still be maintained as a decent RTX 2060 overall-if you use Blender entirely, this is obviously Great. However, I will check if KO is indeed valuable on your neck. At least in the UK, the cheaper RTX 2060 model can be used.
3DMark Royal Port-1080p
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 Super
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2070 Super
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 Super
- RTX 2080 Ti
In general, I find PC hardware reviews very difficult now. I think the whole process of making any type of PC component purchase decision is quite challenging. Investing a large amount of money in a CPU or GPU is usually related to the idea that you don't need to upgrade for another two or three years. The console defines the benchmark, and when we don't know how much performance or what kind of features the next $ 400 / $ 500 box of Sony or Microsoft will have, keep this in mind and it forms a sunken concept. Cash upgrade to PC At this point A real problem. I generally think that unless you really need a major upgrade here and now, the best strategy is probably to sit down.
Although the benchmarks are self-explanatory, it is clear that the RTX 2060 can provide a lot of features. However, I do worry about the card's 6 GB GDDR6 memory allocation, especially when we consider ray tracing support. Wolfenstein Youngblood is not happy with DXR with the best texture quality running in 2060, and if you use DXR with ultra-high quality textures, performance will be greatly reduced in Battlefield V. When I upgraded the DXR feature set with DLSS activated, it seemed that sporadic low-resolution textures also appeared, magnifying it to a higher resolution. The overall performance of the RTX 2060 on more modern ray tracing games looks good, and the new DLSS seems to cover the frame rate while providing excellent quality, but I do doubt whether the VRAM limit will become a bigger issue.
Overall, the RTX 2060 now looks more attractive than today-the price is stable, it has always been an outstanding performance of 1080p and 1440p-and although you can always use the RTX feature set, the ray has improved tracking implementation and DLSS The combination of radical improvements can provide impressive results for new titles. I would like to see "DLSS 2.0" redesigned into key games, such as Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus and Battlefield V, especially Control. This will be a powerful illustration of the entry-level RTX power band promise, it will honor some of the promises made at Gamescom 2018, and will likely be of great help in refuting critics. At the same time, everyone's attention is focused on the next wave of DXR games and what kind of experience 2060 can provide.