01-08-2019, 09:54 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/28326...060-at-349
Quote:Comparing the GTX 1060 to the RTX 2060, it’s hard not to feel like Nvidia is phoning in the specs a bit. While it’s true that the RAM loadouts on the RTX 2070 and 2080 stayed the same as their Pascal counterparts, the GTX 1060 was a thoroughly midrange card, with a 3GB version at ~$200 and a 6GB variant starting around $250. The RTX 2060 is a $349 card — and Nvidia was more than happy to sell you 8GB of VRAM in a $349 back in 2016 with a 256-bit memory bus attached. With AMD now selling 8GB GPUs for under $200, Nvidia’s decision to keep to a 6GB frame buffer doesn’t seem to necessarily bode well for the GPUs long-term future, especially given that next-generation consoles are expected to arrive in the next 12-20 months with 12-16GB of RAM.
...
The central problem with the RTX family from the beginning has been that it offers slim-to-no performance improvements over the GTX cards that were available at the same price. This GPU family is essentially a forward-looking feature play and as we’ve previously stated, we don’t ever recommend buying GPUs based on promises of support in future titles. If we assume that Turing will be Nvidia’s top-end GPU family for 22 months (Pascal set a record at 28 months), 3.5 of those months are already gone. That’s 16 percent of the GPUs entire life at the top of the product stack and there’s currently just one RTX-enabled game you can play. If you ever wanted a nutshell mathematical reason for why ExtremeTech doesn’t recommend buying GPUs today for features you won’t be able to use until tomorrow, there it is.
Compared with the RTX 2070, however, the RTX 2060 is a fairly good deal (Anandtech notes that it offers 86 percent of the performance at 70 percent the price). It improves on the GeForce 1060 6GB by 1.59x while costing 1.4x more. There is, at least, a better argument for the RTX 2060 in certain respects than there was for its higher-end cousins, but the reduced RAM loadout compared with previous generation Nvidia cards could prove a longer-term problem (Anandtech thinks they may have seen some evidence of a RAM-related bottleneck in Wolfenstein 2). Features like HDR and ray tracing itself can also increase RAM buffer pressure. We’re not saying the RTX 2060 will have a problem here, but it’s something to consider.
One difference between the RTX 2060 and the rest of the Turing stack is that in this case, AMD has GPUs competing in this space. The RTX 2060 isn’t just faster than Vega 56, it uses significantly less power while matching 95 percent of Vega 64’s performance. Up until today, AMD could argue that support for FreeSync made a difference in its overall value proposition, but Nvidia’s recent FreeSync support announcement will scythe that argument out from Team Red, assuming that NV support lives up to its promises. Either way, AMD now has a problem.
Right now, the RX 580 is $190, the RX 590 is $260, Vega 56 is $370, and Vega 64 is $400. If AMD wants to remain competitive on price/performance, the RX 590 is going to need to drop to something more like $220 – $240, Vega 56 needs to hit $300, and Vega 64 will need a $50 price cut as well.