Hardware Breakdown Presents: The RTX 2060 Graphics Card
n the not so distant past, NVIDIA launched their next-gen graphics card, the RTX 2080 and 2070. Both were met with excitement prior launch, that is until NVIDIA price revealed. The RTX 2080 retails for $799, $599 for the RTX 2070, the founder's edition RX 2080 Ti goes for the whopping $1200.
All three graphics card uses a whole new Turing GPU architecture, both featuring Ray tracing and DLSS technology which enables the cards to produce detail shadows and reflections in video games. On paper, with its impeccable specs, the card should give high levels of performance per dollar.
In comes the NVIDIA's latest iteration the RTX 2060, which recently launched just ahead of CES 2019. The GPU within this card as expected is pared down from its higher-end counterparts, still featuring ray tracing technology as well as being constructed on the same Turing GPU architecture. Aside from features, the card also differs in price; it retails for just $350. Some has gone on record to say the RTX 2060 should have been first Turing line card to make its market debut.
Nevertheless, we need to dissect the RTX 2060 and examine its core components. As always with Hardware Breakdown, let's use the imagination a bit and get out the screwdriver and open up the RTX 1060.
The Memory
Probably the pinnacle component on any graphics card are the memory, the RTX 1060 has a respectable 6GB GDDR6, with a 192-bit memory interface, memory clock data rate that measures 14Gbps, the same as its higher-end counterparts, memory bandwidth measuring 336.1.
The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
NVIDIA goes with a whole new GPU architecture based off the Turing TU1060, the same processor that powers the higher-end RTX 2070, the six streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) within this graphics card has been disabled, right along with a 20% of its Tensor and RT cores also disabled. When it comes to speed, it's respectable; it's sporting a 1365MHz base clock, a 1680 boost clock.
The GPU Cores
There are 1920 CUDA Cores present within the RTX 2060 card, with 240 Tensor cores, and 30 RT cores, down from 2,304, 288, and 36 found in the RTX 2070 graphics card. What are Tensor cores you ask? It's an accelerated operation where AI performs a series of a precision matrix that multiplies and accumulates calculations in one single operation.
