NVIDIA announces GeForce RTX 2060 along with support for FreeSync monitors

NVIDIA announced today the launch of the GeForce RTX 2060 at CES. The 2060 is the newest member of the new RTX family and will be priced at $349, making it the cheapest.

The RTX 2060 is unlike the 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti, wherein it's not based on a totally separate GPU. Instead, it is based on the sme TU106 that powers the 2070, but with a few modifications.

The 2060 Founders Edition has 1920 CUDA cores and 37 RTX cores. It has a base clock of 1365MHz and boost clock of 1680MHz. It comes with 6GB GDDR6 memory with 192-bit wide memory bus. The GPU has a TDP of 160W.

The 2060 Founders Edition is claimed to be 60% faster than the GTX 1060 and about on par with the GTX 1070 Ti. Contrary to what some thought, the 2060 is capable of ray tracing and can do 5 giga rays/second compared to 6 on the 2070. Considering the 2070 barely qualifies as a ray tracing card, at least in Battlefield V (which is still the only title available with ray tracing), it will be interesting to see what the 2060 manages to achieve in this aspect.

The RTX 2060 is priced at $349 for the Founders Edition model, which features the same design and cooler as the 2070. There will also be custom designed coolers from OEMs, which will all go on sale starting January 15.

Perhaps a more interesting bit of news is that NVIDIA has announced support for the VESA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync protocol, which means PC gamers will finally be able to use NVIDIA graphics cards with AMD FreeSync monitors.

Just like AMD rebrands the VESA spec to FreeSync for its own products, NVIDIA has also incorporated it in the G-Sync protocol. To ensure compatibility, NVIDIA will be testing existing VESA Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync monitors on the market. Those that pass NVIDIA's validation tests will be labeled as G-Sync compatible and will be enabled by default in the GeForce driver.

NVIDIA has currently identified 12 monitors from various manufacturers that are now G-Sync compatible. More models will be added in future but even if your model is not listed or failed validation tests, you will still be able to force variable refresh rate through the GeForce drivers as long as the monitor supports the feature.

Support for these FreeSync monitors will begin starting January 15 with a driver update. This will be available to 10-series and 20-series NVIDIA graphics cards.

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