Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060: rasterisation performance analysis

Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Updated on 19 Jan 2019

Our tests continue with a final quartet of games - Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3 and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Our test system for all benches across this entire review consists of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. A Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used to keep the power-hungry 8700K in check.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

We use FCAT for analysing GPU performance. A coloured border is overlaid in each rendered frame, the video feed from the GPU is captured and the files are then scanned with our own proprietary software. The captures are distilled down into text files which are used to dynamically generate the data presented on this page.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

This is curious - we have two Tomb Raider games on this page and the fortunes of Turing change substantially between them. Rise of the Tomb Raider sees performance sit somewhere between Vega 56 and Vega 64, and it is one of the few games tested here where the GTX 1070 Ti can beat the new RTX card - albeit by just two or three points. Also interesting here is that scalability from 2060 to 2070 and 2080 is a touch lower than expected, even at higher resolutions. And remember - the other Founders Edition RTX cards come with factory overclocks while the RTX 2060 doesn't.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Very High, SMAA

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

After an indifferent result from Rise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider sees a remarkable turnabout, with performance closer to GTX 1080 than 1080 Ti. Curiously, the RTX 2060 offers up excellent performance vs the Vega offerings at 1080p, but the AMD hardware delivers a remarkable comeback at 1440p and 4K. Again, scalability against the other RTX cards is curious - It's only at 4K where we see the performance bumps you'd expect considering the hardware differences between the cards.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Highest, TAA

The Witcher 3

Further evidence of strong 1080p performance from the RTX 2060 here, where its performance lead (even up against GTX 1080) drops the higher up the resolution chain you go. By and large, the RTX 2060 once again delivers an experience that sits at a midpoint between the GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080. Bearing in mind the lack of Turing-specific optimisations, this is strong performance overall from a $350 video card.

Witcher 3: Ultra, Post-AA, No Hairworks

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

Turing loves the idTech 6 engine, and just like the other RTX cards, the 2060 delivers excellent performance for its price-point here. All measurements here are taken with the variable rating shading technology disabled and even without it, the RTX 2060 is faster than the GTX 1080 in all but 4K resolutions. VRS at its most potent delivers another 15 per cent of performance on the RTX 2060 too. Exceptionally impressive stuff. Note: due to incompatibilities between this game and our video capture software, Vega metrics aren't available.

Wolfenstein 2 Vulkan: Uber, TSSAA 8X

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Analysis