Higher performance, ray tracing, and AI capabilities have been at the forefront of our GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card reviews.
However, our conclusions about the models released thus far (the GeForce RTX 2070, the RTX 2080, and the RTX 2080 Ti) have found that the value of their generational performance gains over the preceding GeForce GTX 10 series, although significant, have been offset by higher prices.
In fairness, we've yet to see games take advantage of many of the new technologies in the GeForce RTX 20 series.
But using today's games, we haven't seen the per-dollar performance increase we've seen from previous generations.
At least, that was the case until now.
The GeForce RTX 2060 is the first GeForce RTX 20-series card to offer a substantial per-dollar performance improvement over the prior generation, a distinction that helps this Zotac version of the card ($369.99) earn an Editors' Choice laurel for upper-mid-level graphics cards.
GeForce RTX 2060: The Essentials
The new GeForce RTX 2060 is here to make us rethink the economic angle of RTX.
On paper, its technical specifications are relatively close to those of the $499-starting-price GeForce RTX 2070, but RTX 2060 cards are priced starting at "just" $349.
That makes the GeForce RTX 2060 more expensive than its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 1060 ($299).
However, it's close enough still to be considered mainstream turf.
As our benchmark test results will show, the GeForce RTX 2060 delivers gaming performance well above what we've come to expect from a mid-level performer.
No question, it's faster than the GeForce GTX 1060, and it even outperforms the GeForce GTX 1070 by double-digit percentages.
First, though, let's run through some quick background on the GeForce RTX 2060 and the GeForce RTX 20-series before getting into the finer details.
Based on the new "Turing" architecture, Nvidia's latest generation of graphics processors (GPUs) brings improved gaming performance and new technologies over the outgoing "Pascal" architecture of the GeForce GTX 10 series.
Two of the hallmark new technologies with Turing are hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI-driven Deep Level Super Sampling (DLSS).
Both have seen a slow adoption among game developers, although some lenience is due; it's been less than six months since the GeForce RTX 20-series launch, and that's not a long time in the game-development world.
That's about all I'm going to say about Turing nitty-gritty in this article.
Our GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition review has a comprehensive look at Turing and is well worth a read if you need the background.
Under review is the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp edition from the well-established Nvidia board partner Zotac.
This card shares nearly all of its technical specifications with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition, but is priced at $369 ($20 higher) because of its factory overclock.
Here's how the GeForce RTX 2060 compares to the outgoing GeForce GTX 1060.
(Note I used Nvidia's reference specifications for the GeForce RTX 2060 in the tables below; I'll explain the minor differences with the Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 Amp in the next section.)
| RTX 2060 Founders Edition ("Turing") | GTX 1060 Founders Edition ("Pascal") | |
| Recommended Price | $349 | $299 |
| Base/Boost Clock | 1,365MHz / 1,680MHz | 1,506MHz / 1,708MHz |
| Nvidia CUDA Cores | 1,920 | 1,280 |
| Memory Speed/Standard Memory Config | 14Gbps / 6GB GDDR6 | 8Gbps / 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface Width | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 336GB per second | 192GB per second |
| Graphics Card Power | 160 watts | 120 watts |
| Manufacturing Process | 12nm FinFET | 16nm |
| Power Connectors | Single eight-pin | Single six-pin |
The 50 percent increase in CUDA core count is a good estimator of the raw performance increase we'll see from the GeForce RTX 2060.
According to Nvidia, the Turing-based CUDA cores are more efficient than those from Pascal, so the performance increase could be greater.
A 75 percent improvement in memory bandwidth is sure to help when gaming at high resolutions, too.
The 14Gbps GDDR6 memory is new for the GeForce RTX 20 series.
The GeForce RTX 2060 maintains the 6GB memory loadout of the GeForce GTX 1060.
It would have been nice to see 8GB this time around, but you'll have to spend for a GeForce RTX 2070 if you want that much.
For 1440p gaming, for which the GeForce RTX 2060 is ideally suited, 6GB of video memory is just fine.
It would be barely sufficient for 4K gaming, but running that resolution in most of today's AAA titles is too demanding for the GeForce RTX 2060 without reducing the visual quality settings.
(Look for the benchmarks later in this review.)
RTX 2060 Versus RTX 2070
Now here's how the GeForce RTX 2060 stacks up against its more expensive stablemate, the GeForce RTX 2070:
| RTX 2060 Founders Edition | RTX 2070 Founders Edition | |
| Shading Multiprocessors (SMs) | 30 | 36 |
| CUDA/Tensor/RT Cores | 1,920 / 240 / 30 | 2,304 / 288 / 36 |
| Rated Giga-Rays Per Second/RTX-OPS | 5 / 37 | 6 / 42 |
| Base/Boost Clock | 1,365MHz / 1,680MHz | 1,410MHz / 1,620MHz |
| Memory Speed/Interface Width | 14Gbps / 192-bit | 14Gbps / 256-bit |
| Standard Memory Config/Bandwidth | 6GB GDDR6 / 336GB per sec | 8GB GDDR6 / 448GB per sec |
| Graphics Card Power | 160 watts | 175 watts |
| Power Connectors | Single eight-pin | Single eight-pin |
| Recommended Price | $349 | $499 |
You'll notice several specifications in this comparison that weren't present when I compared the GeForce RTX 2060 to the GeForce GTX 1060, namely the number of Tensor and ray tracing (RT) cores.
Both were introduced with the Turing architecture.
(Be sure to reference that GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition review I linked earlier for the details.)
It's possible to use Nvidia's proprietary RTX-OPS metric to estimate the performance gap between GeForce RTX 20-series cards, which would make the GeForce RTX 2070 about 14 percent faster than the GeForce RTX 2060.
However, RTX-OPS assumes a workload that includes CUDA, Tensor, and RT core operations, among other things, and hardly any games use the former two right now.
Going off the CUDA core count alone, then, the GeForce RTX 2070 should be 20 percent faster than the GeForce RTX 2060, but that's a rough estimate only.
The GeForce RTX 2070 has other specifications that work in its favor, namely its larger memory configuration (8GB versus 6GB) and wider memory bus (256-bit versus 192-bit).
Interestingly, the total board power rating difference between the two is a mere 15 watts, and both use a single eight-pin connector for power.
Now that we're past the essentials, let's see what makes the Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 Amp different from Nvidia's reference card.
The Zotac Tour
As I noted before, Zotac is an Nvidia board partner company.
It takes Nvidia's reference card designs and builds its own graphics cards around them.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp under review here is almost identical to Zotac's other GeForce RTX 2060-based offering, the GeForce RTX 2060 Twin Fan.
(See a tour of all of the RTX 2060 board designs we could find at launch.)
The lone difference between them is that the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is factory-overclocked to 1,800MHz on its boost clock, a 120MHz or 7 percent increase over the 1,680MHz boost clock of the Twin Fan model.
The latter shares its clocks with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition.
I'll explore whether the $20 price bump for the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is worthwhile in the overclocking section of this review.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is a true two-slot card, and a compact one at that.
Its length of 8.3 inches is less than expected for a card in this performance class.
It's 0.7 inch shorter than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition.
Its 4.7-inch width is a few tenths of an inch over what I'd consider truly compact, but it's hard to imagine that causing fitment problems.
The cooling solution on the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp consists of two 90mm fans, and three 6mm heatpipes connected to an aluminum heatsink.
It looks robust enough for a card with a 160-watt board power rating.
I'll look at cooling performance after the benchmarks section.
Here on the bottom edge, you can see more heatpipe detail …
The intricately-cut aluminum backplate is mostly there for strength, but it also adds a measure of passive cooling to the underside.
The Zotac logo along the top edge of the card is backlit in white.
It's not an RGB LED with changeable colors.
The LED is so small, though, that it's not much of a selling point in either event, in my eyes.
The lighting can be disabled in the Zotac Firestorm software.
Note the lack of an SLI connector up here.
On the GeForce RTX 20 series, SLI is supported only on the GeForce RTX 2080 and up.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp has a single eight-pin power connector like the GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition...
Some competing GeForce RTX 2060-based cards from other board partners offer a six-pin connector in addition, although that is not a common practice.
As I'll detail later, this card has plenty of wattage for mild overclocking.
The back of the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp has an HDMI 2.0b video-out port, and three DisplayPort 1.4 video-out connectors...
What it doesn't have is a VirtualLink USB Type-C port, something that is present on the GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition.
This is a potential deal-breaker if you're interested in one of the next-generation virtual-reality headsets.
Meanwhile, the cooling grate back here is mostly aesthetic, as the twin-fan cooling solution on this card sends most of its exhaust air into the case.
RTX 2060 Performance Analysis
PC Labs put the Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 Amp through its paces using a variety of the latest DirectX 11- and DirectX 12-based games and benchmarks.
Our test rig is equipped with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Aorus Z370 Gaming 7 motherboard.
The commentary in the following benchmarks will focus on the performance of the GeForce RTX 2060 relative to the outgoing GeForce GTX 1060 and the GeForce GTX 1070.
Nvidia theoretically replaced the latter with the GeForce RTX 2070, but at a price point higher than that of its predecessor.
That gives the GeForce RTX 2060 the unique opportunity to provide something we haven't seen too strongly from the GeForce RTX 20-series lineup: more performance per dollar than the outgoing cards.
Note the GeForce RTX 2070 in our charts will be represented by the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor.
For the TLDR version of all this, just skip down to the conclusion.
Otherwise, away we go.
Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance.
Futuremark's circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to for 4K-based gaming.
We're looking only at the graphics subscore, not the overall score.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is already showing promise.
Based on the graphics sub-scores, it's just 15 percent behind the more expensive MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor, and 5 percent ahead of the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition.
It scored nearly 50 percent higher than the GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme
This is Futuremark's DirectX 12-enabled benchmark for predicting the performance of DirectX 12-enabled games.
It uses major features of the API, including asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading.
The gap between the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp and the GeForce RTX 2070 Armor narrows to just 8 percent, again focusing on the graphics sub-scores.
It even shows a 6 percent advantage over the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, which isn't likely to continue.
However, the greater percentage gains the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp shows over the GTX 10-series cards in this benchmark, compared to the older 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra test, indicates the RTX 20 series is better optimized for DirectX 12 workloads.
Unigine Superposition
Our last synthetic benchmark is Unigine's 2017 release, Superposition.
This benchmark does incorporate ray tracing, but it's done in software, not hardware, and thus doesn't utilize the RT cores of the RTX 20 series.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is consistently 12 to 14 percent behind the GeForce RTX 2070 Armor.
Its advantage over the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition narrows as the resolution increases, but it is always in the double-digit range.
Real-World Gaming
The following benchmarks are games that you can play.
The charts themselves will list the settings we used (typically the highest in-game presets and, if available, DirectX 12).
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Square Enix's recent title is our first real-world test.
This game is well-optimized for the PC platform, but very demanding at its higher visual quality settings.
(PC Labs had some issues running the game on the RTX 2070, thus the blanks here for that card.)
The 1440p results show a healthy 19 percent lead for the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp over the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition, while it was almost dead-even with the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
The 2015 predecessor to Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still a great benchmark.
The results are starting to seem familiar; the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp is anywhere from 13 to 15 percent behind the GeForce RTX 2070 Armor, and 13 to 18 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition.
Its lead over the GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition remains around the 50 percent mark.
Far Cry 5 and Far Cry Primal
The fourth and fifth installments in the Far Cry series are based on DirectX 11, but still demanding.
We're looping the benchmark charts together since they benchmark similarly.
The GeForce RTX 2060 Amp shows some of its best performance so far in these games, nipping the heels of the GeForce RTX 2070 Armor and matching or slightly bettering the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition.
Final Fantasy XV
We'll take a respite from fps-based benchmarks for Final Fantasy XV.
Consistency is an asset for the GeForce RTX 2060 Amp.
It continues to stay well ahead of the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition, and sits closer to the GeForce RTX 2070 Armor than might have been expected given the disparity in their price points.
World of Tanks Encore
This is another non-fps-based benchmark that's available as a free download.
It's not super demanding, but still a reliable test.
Consistency is consistency, and I'm not complaining.
The GeForce RTX 2060 continues to put the GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition way in the back seat.
Tom Clancy: The Division
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