Nvidia RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition 8GB Review

In what can only be viewed as a thinly-veiled attempt to render AMD's upcoming RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT cards dead on arrival, Nvidia has today announced the RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER. This review is focused on the 2060 SUPER, but if you want to read more about the 2070 SUPER, you can head over to our dedicated review of that card here.

RTX 2060 SUPER is, despite the name, positioned closer to the RTX 2070 than it is to the RTX 2060 which debuted not even 6 months ago. This is because it is built on the TU106 GPU, but with 2 SMs disabled – giving it a total of 2176 CUDA cores. For reference, RTX 2060 has 1920 CUDA cores, RTX 2070 has 2304. 2060 SUPER also has 8GB of VRAM, so you could think of this card as a ‘2070 Lite', though I'm not surprised Nvidia decided against that name!

Being so close to RTX 2070 on paper meant it wasn't too much of a surprise when I got into the benchmarks and discovered 2060 SUPER performing effectively the same as a stock-clocked 2070. It is consistently a couple of frames slower than 2070, yes, but really nothing that you'd notice when actually playing games. In fact, across all of our testing, this 2060 SUPER Founders Edition performed, on average, just 2% slower than MSI's reference-clocked RTX 2070 Armor 8G.

Putting things into context further, the original RTX 2060 is on average 12% slower than this SUPER version, while both GTX 1080 and AMD Vega 64 come in 5% slower. GTX 1080 Ti is still 16% faster across the board, with RTX 2080 increasing that to 23%.

So it's overall a very solid gaming graphics card. You'll be pushing very high frame rates if you want to game at 1080p, while the card will also maintain frame rates over 60FPS with ease if you bump the resolution to 1440p.

As for the Founders Edition card we have been looking at today, aside from some added bling, it is the same as the original RTX 2060's cooler – so it is no surprise to see it perform so well. The GPU core peaked at just 70C, for instance, while noise levels also proved highly competitive for a reference card. Nvidia's partners will really have to be on their game to justify the cost of spending extra on a custom card versus this Founders Edition.

Speaking of cost, the RTX 2060 SUPER is well-placed for mid-range buyers. With an MSRP of £379, we are now getting what is essentially RTX 2070 levels of performance, for £80 less. How much of a good thing this is really depends on your viewpoint. If you're an RTX 2060 or 2070 owner, this is a definite kick in the teeth as your card is pretty much obsolete already. If you were holding off buying a new card, however, you can now get more bang for your buck which is a definite win.

That said, I do feel Nvidia deserves some stick for the SUPER refresh as a whole. Considering neither of the two SUPER models are actually built on new chips – TU106 launched with RTX 2070 last October, while TU104 launched with RTX 2080 last September – to me, it seems like there is no real reason why these ‘SUPER' cards couldn't have just been the original cards. Nvidia had the chips already, and considering the relative price-to-performance increase we are seeing from SUPER versus the original models, with hindsight it seems obvious that Nvidia was holding back on us.

Of course, it makes perfect sense from a business perspective to hold back and see what the competition will do, and it is no coincidence these cards are launching just before AMD's 5700 and 5700 XT cards. From a consumer standpoint, however, gamers will certainly feel a bit short-changed about the whole situation.

So to sum up, if you were going to spend around £380 on a new graphics card, RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB is now bringing what is effectively RTX 2070 performance for an £80 discount. It's nothing new or really that exciting, but it's good for consumers. What AMD has in response with the upcoming Navi cards, we will have to wait and see.

RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition has a MSRP of £379 and will be available from July 9.

Pros

• Effectively as fast as RTX 2070 for less money.
• Founders Edition cooler is very competent.
• Significantly more power efficient than AMD's current cards.
• Overclocked well.

Cons

• It's a refresh, not anything new.
• SUPER makes sense from a business perspective, but RTX early adopters will feel like it's a kick in the teeth.

KitGuru says: It's essentially a mid-cycle refresh of the RTX line up, but RTX 2060 SUPER seems well placed to take on AMD's RX 5700.

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