Having previously launched the high-end versions of their new GeForce RTX cards in the middle of last year, NVIDIA today announced that the entry-level RTX 2060 will launch next week priced at $350.
NVIDIA has made a big deal about their ‘RTX’ 20-series GPUs, which for the first time include hardware dedicated to accelerating ray-tracing and artificial intelligence processing. Though as they lead the launch of the RTX cards with enthusiast models—the 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti—they caught some flak for the price, with the 2070 Founder’s Edition starting at $600.
Now NVIDIA has introduced their entry-level 20-series card, the RTX 2060. Announced on stage at CES 2019 this week, the company said that the RTX 2060 is priced at $350 and will launch globally on January 15th. NVIDIA is planning its own ‘Founder’s Edition’ of the 2060, which will launch on the same day as other versions of the card made by the company’s hardware partners.
NVIDIA said that the RTX 2060 is more powerful than the previous generation GTX 1060, 1070, and 1070 Ti cards. At launch the 2060 will be bundled for a limited time with the customer’s choice of Battlefield 5 or the upcoming Anthem.
As a GPU based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, the RTX 2060 will support the VitualLink connection standard, which will allow upcoming VR headsets to connect to the PC through a single USB-C port on the GPU. While VirtualLink is technically supported under the hood, it’s possible that some versions of the 2060 will not include the necessary USB-C port; which ports are on the GPU is up to the card maker. All of NVIDIA’s own Founder’s Edition cards include the USB-C port.
Along with accelerated ray-tracing and AI processing, NVIDIA has also said that the Turing architecture in the RTX cards brings with it new and enhanced VR rendering features.
Update (January 7th, 2018): Corrected RTX 2070 Founder’s Edition price from $500 to $600 (thanks for the heads up in the comments, Zerofool). While the RTX 2070 ‘started at’ $500, the Founder’s Edition from Nvidia launched at $600.