Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060: rasterisation performance analysis

Our battery of tests continues with a trio of Ubisoft titles - Far Cry 5, Far Cry Primal and Ghost Recon Wildlands. Our test system remains the same obviously, consisting of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. To ensure that the power-hungry 8700K doesn't overheat, a Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

All performance data is derived from video captures of each graphics card - no internal metrics here, the gold standard in analysis comes from measuring what's actually emerging from the video output of the GPU.

Far Cry 5

Vega 56 arrived a while back, supplanting the established go-to card for 1440p gaming - the GTX 1070. GTX 1070 Ti arrived shortly thereafter, restoring the performance advantage to Nvidia, but certain games do use key parts of the Vega architecture, delivering higher levels of performance. Far Cry 5's use of rapid-packed math (double-rate FP16) is one such title. RTX 2060 is faster than 1070 Ti but it's one of the few titles where Vega can still compete against the new Turing offering. It's a touch faster at 1080p, but Turing bests it when moving to 1440p, before staging something of a comeback at 4K. In this title, RTX 2060 sits at a midpoint between GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080.

Far Cry Primal

Far Cry Primal is the prior game in the franchise, built on an older version of the Dunia Engine. There's no rapid-packed math support here, so Vega performance drops back a little, with RTX 2060 effectively matching Vega 64 at 1080p. The numbers shift in AMD's favour as we scale up in resolution terms, but it's interesting to note that GTX 1080 retains its five per cent lead over RTX 2060 across all three measured pixel-counts.

Ghost Recon Wildlands

On its high setting, Ghost Recon Wildlands on PC offers up something very close to Xbox One X quality levels with decent performance, but on very high - and especially on the ultra setting tested here - the game transforms into a GPU-mangling beast that soaks up compute power alongside massive VRAM utilisation. Even at 1080p, GTX 1080 can only scrape ahead of a 60fps average, with RTX 2060 just under five per cent slower. Again, there's virtual performance parity with GTX 1070 Ti, though the 2060 pushes ahead just a touch at 1440p and 4K.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• DLSS - Deep Learning Super-Sampling and Variable Rate Shading: Performance Analysis
• Assassin's Creed Odyssey/Unity, Battlefield 1, Crysis 3 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 1
• Far Cry 5, Far Cry Primal, Ghost Recon Wildlands - Rasterisation Analysis Part 2 [This Page]
• Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3, Wolfenstein 2 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 3
• Battle of the 1080p Champs - RTX 2060 vs GTX 1060, RX 580, RX 590 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 4
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 - the Digital Foundry verdict