CES 2019: Freshly launched £329 RTX 2060 is more powerful than GTX 1070Ti, claims Nvidia

Nvidia shows off RTX 2060 running Battlefield V with real-time ray tracing and 60fps at 1440p

Nvidia launched the RTX 2060 graphics card at the CES 2019 trade show over on Sunday, claiming that the ‘affordable' graphics card is more powerful than the GTX 1070Ti.

A Founders Edition of the card, which will cost $349 in the US and is already for sale in the UK at £329, will also offer ray-tracing capabilities.

However, while Nvidia claims that the card is more powerful than the top of the line GTX 1070, it has been stripped-back compared to the already launched RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 1080 Ti.

It packs 1,920 CUDA cores compared to the 2,304 the RTX 2070 has on offer. It also comes with 6GB of GDDR6 memory and 240 Tensor Cores that can deliver 52 teraflops of processing power, and five GigaRays per second of ray-tracing performance.

At the launch, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated the card running Battlefield V with real-time ray tracing and 60fps at 1440p. Huang also showed off a series of benchmarks, showing the RTX 2060 outperforming AMD's Radeon RX 590 by 22 per cent, although the RTX 1060 is around £100 more expensive.

"Next-gen gaming starts today for tens of millions of gamers everywhere," said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

"Desktop gamers are demanding, and the RTX 2060 sets a new standard — an unbeatable price, extraordinary performance and real-time ray tracing that blurs the distinction between movies and games. This is a great moment for gamers and our industry."

Nvidia has also, effectively, waved the white flag over its proprietary (and expensive) G-Sync technology, updating drivers to enable Nvidia graphics cards to adopt FreeSync.

G-Sync and FreeSync were developed by Nvidia and AMD respectively to synchronise refresh rates between graphics card and monitor. The aim of both technologies is to reduce screen tearing and stuttering.

However, hardware-based G-Sync adds between £150 and £200 to the price of a monitor, while AMD's FreeSync uses the standard DisplayPort Adaptive Sync protocols to do the same thing and is radically cheaper.

FreeSync has also been adopted by Intel, which is planning to release its own discrete graphics card range in 2020.