When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 launched in January, it served as a fine entry point into Nvidia’s new ray-traced future. It was definitely more expensive than its Pascal equivalent, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, but it still allowed users to live their lives ray traced with a smaller entrance fee. Still, it was held back from reaching 1440p greatness.
Those days are over.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super is here, and if Nvidia’s claims are true, it’ll bring RTX 2070 equivalent performance to the mainstream. We haven’t been able to conduct a full review, but we were able to go hands-on with the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 Super. After some brief time playing games on the card, it may just be the GeForce graphics card to keep your eye on in 2019.
(Image credit: Future)
Price and availability
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super will hit store shelves on July 9, and will set you back $399 (about £315, AU$580) for the Founders Edition. We don’t have pricing information for third-party cards quite yet, but we would expect the price to be even lower there.
You may have noticed that this slots in exactly where the Founders Edition of the vanilla RTX 2060 was, and there’s a reason for that. Nvidia is pushing the price of the original Founders RTX 2060 down to $349 (about £275, AU$500), making entry into Nvidia’s ray traced vision even cheaper.
The most important thing to note here is that Nvidia claims that the RTX 2060 Super is able to come within spitting distance of the original RTX 2070′s performance – just a 1% difference. If that’s true – and our initial impressions certainly make it seem that way – the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super is a serious value.
(Image credit: Future)
Features and chipset
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super uses the same underlying Turing architecture as its predecessor, but it sees plenty of improvements, particularly when it comes to core counts and VRAM.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super features 2,176 CUDA cores, compared to the RTX 2060’s 1,920. They’re also clocked higher, featuring a boost clock of 1,650 MHz. These improvements alone go a long way to explaining the boost to 7.2 TFLOPs of raw power. We don’t have a spec for ray tracing cores, but ray tracing performance also gets a bump, as the RTX 2060 Super is capable of pushing out 6 Giga Rays.
What’s more, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super features 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, up from 6GB on the original model. This should make it more future-proof, and also makes the graphics card more feasible for 1440p gaming. This all comes with a bump in power consumption, however, with the new Turing card consuming 175 Watts of power.
Physically, however, the card looks remarkably similar to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition. However, the RTX 2060 Super Founders Edition has a chrome design under the logo, making it more reflective. This probably won’t mean much if you don’t have a see-through case, but it’s a welcome design uptick.
(Image credit: Future)
Performance
Thanks to the boosted specs, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super should be the card to get if you want to play at 1440p with ray tracing enabled. While we haven’t had a chance to put it through our full load of benchmarks, we were able to play some games with the card equipped. And, well, we were impressed.
Metro Exodus, one of the hardest PC games to run, is extremely smooth at 1440p, with all the graphical dials turned up to Ultra. Even with ray tracing and DLSS enabled, we are still able to get a playable experience – even if it wasn’t locked at 60 frames per second (fps).
Similarly, we were able to turn all the knobs up in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and we were amazed that we didn’t see any performance fumbles during the intro.
At the end of the day, if the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 is able to handle these games at 1440p without stumbling, you likely won’t run into any major problems with other AAA games. We’ll have to put it through some more stringent testing before we’re able to make a final recommendation, but it’s looking good – especially if you have a G-Sync monitor.
(Image credit: Future)
Early verdict
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super might be the Nvidia graphics card for most PC gamers to get. It’s not prohibitively expensive, and it will likely let you play most games at 1440p without much – if any – loss in detail. Plus, with the newly expanded 8GB frame buffer, this graphics card should last much longer.
It’s also much more affordable than the RTX 2070 was at launch, and because the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super offers basically the same level of performance, the value speaks for itself. We know we can’t wait to put it through more rigorous testing.
