NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Review: Reasonably Priced Ray Tracing

Name: GeForce RTX 2060
Brand: GeForce

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, January 07, 2019, 09:00 AM EDT

GeForce RTX 2060 - 3DMark Time Spy And Fire Strike

Page 3: GeForce RTX 2060 - 3DMark Time Spy And Fire Strike

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from Futuremark. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multithreading. Time Spy is designed to test the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the Futuremark Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards and other system resources driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

3DMark Time Spy

Direct X 12 Performance

3DMark Time Spy

time1

We continued to see more of the same with 3DMark Time Spy. In this DX12 test, the GeForce RTX 2060 finishes ahead of the GeForce GTX 1080 and Vega 64, but trails the RTX 2070 by a fairly large margin.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

The scales tipped in favor of Pascal in the DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark. Here, the GeForce RTX 2060 ends up trailing the GeForce GTX 1070 by the tiniest of margins in the overall score. If you look at the individual results though, the GeForce RTX 2060 is actually faster than the 1070 in GT1 and the Combined test, but the deficit in GT2 drags down the overall result.