RTX For The People | £125 Geforce RTX 2060

it's less than a year since I last looked at the RTX 2060 so you might be wondering why I'm reviewing it again after all it's the same card and nothing comparable in features or prices launched in that time so why bother going over it again won't the results be pretty much the same well it may well be the same GPU as it was in 2022 in 2023 it's everything else that's changed since I last looked at the RTX 2060 two things have happened that make me want to reevaluate the cheapest of nvidia's rt-enable graphics cards in one aspect the six gigabyte version of the 2060 should be slightly less desirable than before so far 2023 has seen a steep rise in vram requirements in new games and while it's not in the rather dire position of the four gigabyte cards some of which will trigger vram warnings even at low quality settings it's not far off on the other hand the most intriguing thing about the RTX 2060 is just how far its price has fallen in the last year 200 pounds was the going rate last September but since then it seems the competition on the used Market has driven prices way down I picked up a gigabyte model for just 125 pounds from a miner who was selling off a whole rig's worth of cards and while that was a fairly exceptional deal it's not unrealistic to look for buy now prices less than 150 pounds and auctions closing even lower than that this means that for the first time a used RTX card is competing in price with the newest new gpus available like the RX 6500 XT Arc A380 and gzx 1630s sorry it's hard to say that last one with a straight face last time I don't think I fully explored the 2060s RTX potential with Ray tracing and dlss either this time I think it's worth going a little deeper to do so I'm running through the usual test Suite on the moderately priced gaming PC this is a minor upgrade from last year with a ryzen 5 5600x instead of the alt 5600g and now up to 32 gigabytes of ddr4 one of the more notorious releases of 2023 the PC Port of The Last of Us Part 1 has been presented as one of the death knells the sub 8 gigabyte graphics cards but In fairness to the RTX 2060 even if it had more than six gigabytes it would struggle to deliver 60 FPS at 1080 medium it only manages 56 FPS on average and while theoretically more vram would allow for some higher quality settings in reality you'd either need to drop resolution or overclock the card to get to that 60fps Target 1440p meanwhile isn't out of the question especially if you're not too concerned with gaming at 60 at the low preset with some texture settings turned up to medium the 2060 fell just under 50 FPS without exceeding the vram limit [Music] Star Wars Jedi Survivor can't hit a constant 60 with this card even at 1080 low and 1080 High looks great but has one percent lows barely above 30 FPS averaging a little under 50 FPS this is actually pretty playable if not ideal at 1440p meanwhile it is possible to maintain a 30 plus average by dropping to the medium preset but one percents are pretty low foreign remake performs very well on the RTX 2060 though you do need to be somewhat wary of your settings to make sure you stick within the vram limits at 1080 Graphics priority the game Glides along at a very smooth 85 FPS with one percent low as well over 60. turning up to 1440 is a bit of a stretch so you may want to drop a setting or two to ensure things remain smooth the 2060 is wild overkill for playing Forza Horizon 5 at 1080 as high settings the game runs at 110 FPS in the canned Benchmark and will run even higher in the open world pushing up to ultra has a heavy impact on frames dropping them to below 80 on average but still above 60 FPS at minimum I didn't dare try 1440 at Ultra the game is quite vram heavy even though it doesn't always let you know it until you've started playing at high however it runs at 85 FPS on average and one percents are above 70. foreign [Music] it's pretty uncommon that I actually find a card that can comfortably Run Halo infinite above low settings at least at a reasonable frame rate the 2060 is one such card it manages to maintain 60 plus pretty much all of the time at 1080 High averaging 74 FPS there's even room to turn the resolution up to 1440 though unless you drop other settings too that will send averages below 60. [Music] at 1080 High Plateau Requiem fails to reach the 60fps mark on average which is a little disappointing on the other hand if you accept that pal is the superior standard you can instead see it as being slightly above the 50 FPS Mark and therefore be much happier in your life at 1440 you're looking at an average of 35 with lows below 30. you might consider dropping to medium at this point or using some kind of upscaling more on that later [Music] God of War at 1080 High still fits within the 2060s six gigabytes of available vram and is extremely smooth at nearly 80 FPS on average and over 60 FPS 1 lows turning up to 1440 can remain close to 60 on average which is a pleasant surprise though of course that does mean one percent lows drop well below 60. [Music] foreign tyx 2060 has no problem with Spider-Man remastered with 1080 very high managing 100 FPS on average and even 1440 remaining over 60 FPS both suffer from some pretty alarming spikes during my Benchmark run however and I think the vram might possibly be to blame with averages like this it might seem silly to drop settings but I don't think it could hurt to try [Music] Uncharted 4 presents a very clear Line in the Sand for the 2060. at 1080p you can do what you like even go all the way up to the ultra preset and still expect a 60 plus experience what you probably don't want to do is increase the resolution any further turning up to 1440 even at the high preset takes a sledgehammer to the 2016's knees dropping all the way to 35 FPS [Applause] cdpr developers of cyberpunk 2077 actually name dropped the six gigabyte 2060 in the game's current system requirement sheet allegedly this card should be good for 1440 Ultra but I'm afraid I have to call BS on that at 1080 High the game can almost manage a 60 FPS average which is actually quite acceptable in my opinion though the game still looks great at medium if you wanted to glean a few more frames 1440 medium only manages 44 FPS and Ultra Falls all the way to 32 FPS with lows of 24. [Music] the latest update to The Witcher 3 still runs very nicely on the RTX 2060 at 1080 it's possible to play at ultra settings and still see in excess of atfps with one percent lows close to 60. pushing up to 1440 without dropping settings doesn't quite hit 60fps and lows drop into the 40s but you still have plenty of room to drop quality if you own a 1440 monitor testing fortnite can be somewhat laborious and hard to keep consistent so I've taken to using the replay function to Benchmark the same match at different quality settings at 1080 low with epic view distance the 2060 can push over 200 FPS at medium that drops slightly but still remains over 160. at high it's possible to see almost 90 FPS which means you get some nice visuals without completely gutting your frame rates the Epic preset however is a no-go those fancy Lumen and nanite features drop the average to just 30 FPS 1440p meanwhile is an option especially at the lower competitive settings that manages 148 FPS while the medium preset still maintains 100. [Music] finally Call of Duty war zone 2 just Warzone now I guess can pull some pretty decent frames at the ultra quality presets at 1080 it hits 85 though lows do drop below 60 and that might make you consider dropping quality somewhat you'll definitely want to make some tweaks at 1440 because while the average is over 60 FPS the one percents are only just over 30. [Music] and that's the RTX 2016 as it comes out of the box and this is how I describe it when comparing with AMD cards and older GTX models but how about some of those RTX specific features after all the most exciting aspect of this card is that it's the cheapest one with both RT and dlss let's start with the good news dlss is nvidia's proprietary temporal upscaler this means that it uses previously rendered frames to provide resolution data to fill in gaps caused when scaling up from a lower resolution Source unlike other temporal upscaling Tech from AMD and epic games dlss relies on the tensor course to fix temporal artifacts and these cores are absent from the GTX Series so the 2060 is about the cheapest car that has access to it right now dlss isn't available in every game a fact which has been at the center of some controversy lately but is generally acknowledged to be about the highest quality upscaling Tech out there right now and is certainly the best reason to pick the RTX 2060 over other similarly priced cards The Last of Us Part One benefits greatly from even the highest dlss setting pushing the 1080 medium average up close to 70 FPS and 1440 low medium into the mid 70s too a plateau Requiem benefits hugely jumping from a 50 FPS average at 1080 High to a mighty 69. I feel like you're waiting for me to say something at 1440 High the average climbs to 50 and lows are now well above 30 FPS in God of War the increase in performances high but essentially meaningless you are already getting 60 plus without dlss on the other hand it is extremely beneficial at 1440p meaning potentially a 60 plus experience most of the time Spider-Man is a bit of a weird one a 1080 quality dlss actually drops frame rates both average and one percent this might perhaps suggest that dlss is causing a CPU bottleneck or something anyway 1440p gains some extra frames to its average but one percent lows barely budge Uncharted 4 was already doing perfectly well without dlss at 1080p though adding it does send frames even higher it's more beneficial for anyone trying to game at 1440 however as averages now hit a very playable 50 FPS cyberpunk 2077 becomes fairly smooth with quality dlss at 1080 the average climbs from 60 to a more assured 76 with lows still a little below 50. at 1440 dlss essentially gives the same performance as a native 1080P and the game of course still looks great the 1440 Ultra that cdpr recommends this card for rises from 32 fps to 46 with the LSS Q I didn't spend too long testing fortnite with dlss as 1080 clearly didn't need it at low or medium at 1440 the medium preset climbed from 100 fps to 133 with DLS SQ and 150 with dlss balanced plus I don't know what it is but fortnite's Graphics just seem to tolerate dlss really well sometimes you'd hardly even notice it was on Warzone meanwhile jumps from 85 to 96 FPS on average with lows almost reaching 60 at 1080p 1440 also becomes eminently more playable climbing from 62 to 82 and with lows of 45. [Music] of course dlss isn't the only part of the RTX branding that makes the 2060 appealing right what about Hardware Ray tracing well the thing is Hardware RT is really really taxing on the GPU so although lower end cards like the 2060 can trace Rays it comes at a heavy cost Jedi survivors self-shadowing actually breaks without RT so it has a real noticeable benefit in this game however at 1080p High it drops from the mid 40s to just under 30 FPS at 1440p frame rates drop painfully low and there's no dlss functionality included FSR does a similar job to dlss and will certainly make for a better RT experience but then any GPU can enable FSR Resident Evils RT preset is not particularly demanding at least not in the area are used for testing a 1080 the game is still a very playable 70 FPS and at 1440 there's very little impact forza's in-game RT only kicks in when the setting is turned up to ultra using RT with the ultra quality preset exceeds the six gigabyte frame buffer both when added to the high preset 1080p drops from 110 to 96 FPS at 1440 it drops from 85 to 77 and enabling dlss quality sends it right back up to 85 again RT does a real number on a plateau Requiem cutting averages and minimums almost in half to barely 30 FPS on average adding dlss quality at least helps maintain a steady 30 with averages of about 40. Spider-Man can handle RT at 1080 still running over 60 FPS on average but with the same nasty frame time spikes as before 1440 doesn't do so well dropping to 46 on average with one percent lows of 24 FPS adding dlssq helps somewhat bringing the average up to 56 and a half and lows close to 30 but you'd still probably want to drop to dlss balanced for this one cyberpunk is of course the flagship RT title so you'd be forgiven for wanting to try it out at 1080 there are three main presets low just enables local shadows and has the least performance impact 44 FPS without dlss 62 with dlss quality medium enables RT Sun shadows and medium lighting but hammers frame rates down to 23 without dlss and 34 with it the RT Ultra preset brings full GI and Reflections and only 12 FPS on average dlss balance can bring that up to 24 but any lower scaling will have a seriously negative effect on quality fan next to no performance benefits RT overdrive well I didn't really bother testing I saw five FPS standing still and the FSR was never going to fix that Witcher 3 likewise sees a heavy impact from RT adding the full Suite of Arty effects to the high precess drops the average FPS from 86 at 1080p to just 20. balanced dlss can get close to 30 FPS but I have to ask why you'd bother at that point in the same vein fortnite's epic preset with Hardware RT enabled drops from 30 FPS without to 24 FPS width and dlss balanced only brings that up to 42. enabling RT in competitive games is rarely worth it and in this case it's pretty much guaranteed to get you killed [Music] so should you consider buying the RTX 2060 if you're open to used gpus at all and aren't put off by the very real likelihood that they've been previously used for mining crypto then it's a pretty sound bar at 125 to 150 pounds of course it's not alone the GTX 1080 from Nvidia and RX 5600 XT or maybe even the 5700 XT can all be had for similar prices and at least one of those cards can way out perform the 2060. the best reasons to own one then are the RTX specific features dlss and Hardware a tracing but both of these come with caveats as future-proofing technology dlss is about as good as it gets right now but it's not available in every game frame generation a technology that might well have a big impact on gaming in the future isn't an option on the RTX 2060. Ray tracing May one day replace conventional rendering modes altogether but by the time that happens I think the 2016 may have been completely outclassed it's not even powerful enough to run some heavier RT titles now without heavy upscaling finally the six gigabyte frame buffer probably means this card's only going to be good for 1080p in the near future and with reduced settings at that on a more positive note it's actually fairly efficient at stock and can be made even more so without sacrificing performance check out the video on screen now for more about that thanks for watching kindly do the usual YouTube things if you feel so inclined and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Iceberg Tech

Views: 80,582

Keywords: iceberg, RTX 2060 6GB in 2023, RTX 2060 6GB still good, can RTX 2060 6GB play games, RTX 2060 6GB resident evil 4, RTX 2060 6GB plague tale requiem, RTX 2060 6GB spider-man remastered, RTX 2060 6GB forza horizon 5, RTX 2060 6GB halo infinite, RTX 2060 6GB uncharted, RTX 2060 6GB god of war, RTX 2060 6GB cyberpunk, witcher 3 remastered, RTX 2060 6GB the last of us, RTX 2060 6GB jedi survivor, RTX 2060 6GB fortnite, RTX 2060 6GB warzone 2, cheap ray tracing, cheap dlss

Id: 1a__6GpjFC0

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023