The RTX 2060 is Nvidia’s next GeForce graphics card in the 20-series range of Turing-based GPUs. Though Nvidia itself hasn’t said word one about the next-gen mainstream GeForce GPUs, given all the rumour-mongering around it right now we’re pretty confident it is happening.

Which isn’t all that surprising considering there are still thousands of current-gen mainstream Nvidia cards still clogging up the channels and making it very difficult for the green team to realistically think about replacing them. Hell, Jen-Hsun’s even halted shipping any mainstream GPUs until next year because there are so many damned GTX 1060s still sitting on the shelves.

But the rumour mill has been grinding away, and perennial leaker, Videocardz, has been slowly spilling the GPU beanz from a ‘found’ reviewer’s guide. And, according to its latest newz, we will have a shiny new 20-series card released this month that should actually be affordable for us normal PC gamers. Well, moderately affordable at least. Y’know, for those of us who can’t afford to drop some $500 on an RTX 2070, the current lowest priced Nvidia Turing graphics card around right now.

But what will that GPU look like, how will it perform, how much will it cost, and will we still be able to ray trace the fun out of Battlefield V using the lowest-spec Turing GPU?

VITAL STATS

Release date
The Videocardz story claims the RTX 2060 will be announced in early January with the card on shelves on January 15. We were expecting a Q2 showdown with AMD’s Navi GPUs, but this latest rumour pegs an announcement for the second week in January.

Specs
The RTX 2060 is expected to be built around a slightly cut-down version of the TU106 GPU used inside the RTX 2070. It is suggested that it will sport 30 SMs and therefore 1,920 CUDA cores, but also a good portion of ray tracing tech too. But with different memory configs we could also see RTX 2060s with different GPU specs too.

Pricing
The current rumours are that the base card will come in at $349 while the third-party and factory overclocked cards will likely sit around the $400 mark, or above.

Performance
The expectation is the RTX 2060 will offer gaming performance somewhere in between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1070 Ti. Nvidia might also want the RTX 2060 to be able to hit the 5Giga Rays per second mark as that’s the absolute minimum for a decent experience with real-time ray tracing. And it’s going to want to do something with that Tensor and RT Core silicon sitting inside the TU106 too.


NVIDIA RTX 2060 RELEASE DATE
The RTX 2060 will be on the shelves come January 15, according to the Videocardz leak, with the card itself being announced at the CES event in Las Vegas on January 7.

We had thought that if Nvidia was being smart, and as ruthlessly tactical as we know it can be, then the RTX 2060 release date would be set sometime after team Radeon had released the new AMD Navi graphics cards. But that doesn’t seem like the way it’s going to go.

Navi is set to be AMD’s direct replacement for Polaris – despite what Lisa Su has said about competing at the high end – and ought to be dropping into the mainstream as a next-gen 7nm alternative. That’s the end of the market the RTX 2060 is looking to make its home, and it would make sense for Nvidia to wait and see what the performance of the flagship Navi card ends up being before finalising the speeds and feeds of its own mainstream offering.

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Given that Nvidia needs to wait for at least one whole sales quarter – and probably two – for the existing mainstream 10-series GPUs in the channel to shift, holding off until after Navi wouldn’t seem to be too much of a stretch. But maybe the RTX 2060 isn’t as ‘mainstream’ as we might hope it would be.

And we were hoping for an exciting, competitive, combative Computex with two high-volume GPUs launching around the same time. Shame.

NVIDIA RTX 2060 SPECS
Ever since the RTX moniker was first announced there has been a lot of chatter about whether Nvidia would stick with the RTX branding right across the stack, or have the lower-end GPUs reverting to the GTX prefix without the power to ray trace in real time.

With the latest leaks it looks like Nvidia is doing the smart thing and sticking with the RTX 2060 branding for consistency, and to provide a link between its absolute best GPUs – that super-smash RTX 2080 Ti – and the low-end of its 20-series stack.

The speculation is that Nvidia will use a slightly cut-down version of the TU106 GPU for the RTX 2060. That’s the same chip as you’ll find in the RTX 2070, but supposedly with 30 SMs instead of 36, making a grand total of 1,920 CUDA cores.

If Nvidia is using the same TU106 chip it would be unlikely to cut out the ray tracing and AI silicon already backed into the GPU. And if the performance scales in a linear fashion the percentage cut to the RT Cores would represent a drop from 6 Giga Rays per second on the RTX 2070 to 5 Giga Rays per second for the RTX 2060.

Which just so happens to be the minimum level needed for a decent real-time ray tracing experience with DXR.

But even if the RTX 2060 doesn’t have the high-end silicon cojones to power real-time ray tracing in games to any serious degree, Nvidia has already set out its stall saying that RTX-support does not automatically equate to ray tracing. The RTX tag used for games is also being seen as denoting support for the other new features baked into the Turing GPUs, such as the AI-powered deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) and variable rate shading.

Both of those are performance-enhancing features and could be genuinely effective technologies if used correctly at the lower-end of the graphics card market.

Videocardz is also saying the new card will coincide with DICE adding DLSS support to Battlefield V. By combining ray tracing and DLSS the RTX 2060 is reportedly able to offer DirectX Raytracing performance at the same level as standard rasterized rendering.

There are also reports that Gigabyte at least will be releasing many, many different versions of the RTX 2060, with six variants and 39 different SKUs. How, you may ask? By using differing levels of GDDR6 and GDDR5X memory. There are supposedly versions of the card with 6GB, 4GB, and 3GB configurations, with GDDR6 and GDDR5X versions at each level.

Madness.

NVIDIA RTX 2060 PRICING
Pricing for the RTX 2060 is going to be key, but Nvidia has already set out its pricing strategy at the high-end and it looks like the RTX 2060 is going to fairly closely follow suit with a $349 base price for the Nvidia verson.

Given the price hikes for the different levels of GPUs – from RTX 2070 through to RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti – compared with their 10-series brethren, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to expect the RTX 2060 to be priced way higher than the GTX 1060.

That TU106 GPU is a mighty big slice of silicon, after all. The 445mm2 chip is approximately 123% larger than the last-gen GP106 used in the GTX 1060, and all those transistors cost a whole lot of monies to manufacture.

So it’s not surprising that the RTX 2060 is being priced at the same sort of level as the GTX 1070 was at launch. The GTX 1070 came out at $379, while the GTX 1060 was a $199 card. This then isn’t really a volume-centric mainstream graphics card.

NVIDIA RTX 2060 PERFORMANCE
There have been some early RTX 2060 benchmarks leaked by the Final Fantasy XV database. Yes, that ever-reliable FF XV benchmark. It’s not really a benchmark we use when we’re testing graphics card capabilities due to its less-than-consistent results. You can see that from the database itself where you’ll find RX Vega 56 cards beating out AMD’s flagship RX Vega 64, for example.

Still, it’s the first vague notion of RTX 2060 performance we’ve seen and shows the test RTX 2060 delivering JRPG performance that’s 30% higher than the GTX 1060, and 22% faster than the new AMD RX 590. Which isn’t that exciting. We’d have maybe hoped that it would at least a touch faster than the GTX 1070, yet it’s actually 6% slower according to this.

The performance leaks from Videocardz, however, claims the card will deliver gaming performance that is comparable to the GTX 1070 Ti. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the same performance as a 1070 Ti, so it might fall somewhere between that and the straight GTX 1070.

But will it ray trace? Nvidia has told us that tracking 5 billion rays per second is about the minimum for a meaningful ray traced experience, and the current RTX 2070 is rated at around the 6 billion rays per second mark. With a little lopped off the TU106 should still be able to deliver 5 Giga Rays per second of ray tracing performance.

The Videocardz leaks suggests that not only will it ray trace, but it will also see the introduction of DLSS with the only ray tracing game yet released: Battlefield V. With both features enabled the report claims that gaming performance is roughly comparable to standard gaming performance without ray tracing enabled.

THE RTX 2060 WISHLIST…
So, what about the pie-in-the-sky daydreams we might harbour around the RTX 2060, what would we ideally like it to be? Obviously ridiculously cheap with GTX 1080 Ti levels of gaming performance would be grand… but unfeasible.

We also can’t help but long for the days of the gorgeous single slot graphics card. Again, that’s unlikely from the temperatures some Turing GPUs have been posting under load, but that doesn’t stop us also hoping for some really shiny small form factor designs too.

And NVLink. We know Nvidia has nixed it from even the RTX 2070, but go on, give us the chance to jam a pair of RTX 2060 GPUs into our rigs and get high-end, sometimes frustratingly awkward performance. Again, it’s not going to happen, but a nerd can dream…