Nvidia's only mid-range graphics cards that are available to buy right now are from its last-generation, Pascal lineup. The GTX 1060 and 1070 are decent cards, but old and relatively outstripped by AMD's more affordable mid-range solutions. Nvidia is looking to hit back hard though, with its RTX 2060, which the specifications claim will be more capable than a GTX 1070 Ti.
As is so often the case, VideoCardz has been gifted with the leaked specifications and performance numbers for the as-yet-unannounced card. It's not an official debut by any means, so should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the numbers still have us tantalized for the card's potential.
The RTX 2060 will reportedly ship with 1,920 CUDA cores -- around 400 less than the RTX 2070 -- 30 RT cores and 240 Tensor cores. That should mean it can handle entry-level ray tracing in some games, like Battlefield V. It should also be able to utilize DLSS to help mitigate any real performance loss from running that high-level lighting solution. Its clock speeds will also be less than that of the RTX 2070, though not by much. 1,365MHz at base, boosting to 1,680MHz -- that's only 30Mhz less in the end.
The first version will have 6GB of GDDR6, though it will have a 192-bit memory bus.
All of that delivers performance somewhere between 1070 Ti and 1080 levels. It managed over 100 FPS in Far Cry 5 and Battlefield V. It hit more than 222 FPS in VR mark, and close to 140FPs in Wolfenstein 2. In some cases that's in excess of what a 1080 can handle at 1080P and 1440P.
AMD's Navi will have to be very strong and affordable if it wants to compete with what the RTX 2060 appears to offer.