ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming Review

In the spotlight is ASUS Republic of Gamers STRIX RTX 2060 OC graphics card aka ROG-STRIX-RTX2060-6G-GAMING. Is this NVIDIA custom design worth your hard earned cash?

Product on Review: ROG STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming
Manufacturer: ASUS Republic of Gamers
Street Price: £428 GBP – $420 USD – $699 AUD

A few weeks ago NVIDIA unveiled their fourth graphics card to join the new RTX family, namely RTX 2060. Being the lowest SKU in the lineup, the RTX 2060 carries a lower specification compared to the other models and thus a smaller price-tag too.

Along with the Founders Edition a flurry of custom designs also hit the market one of which we’ll be exploring in today’s review. The ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming not only features a custom design via the Direct CU III cooling solution, but it also supplies us with a factory overclock – taking this card to the top of the performance leaderboard for this class of GPU.

So far pricing has been a contentious subject for NVIDIA’s RTX 20-series, but does the more affordable RTX 2060 make more sense for gamers wanting to enjoy the benefits that this new series brings? Let’s find out.

ASUS ROG on STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming

The ROG Strix GeForce® RTX 2060 teams up NVIDIA®’s A-list GPU with an elite cast of specialists, setting the stage for epic gaming action. Gargantuan power delivery provides the muscle to push overlocking boundaries, while cooling that’s honed to perfection keeps the spotlight squarely on Turing™’s performance. And with an arsenal of utilities that allow you to customize and tweak this extreme hardware, you call the shots.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RTX 2060 OC supplied directly by ASUS:

GPU
RTX 2060 (TU106)
Stream Processor
1920
Video Memory
6GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
192-bit
Engine Clock
1395MHz
Engine Clock Boost
Gaming Mode: 1680MHz
OC Mode: 1710MHz
Memory Clock
1750MHz – 14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
2x DisplayPort 1.4
2x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Triple-fan solution
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
300 x 128 x 50 mm

Additional Improvements

UPDATED CACHE & SHARED MEMORY ARCHITECTURE

Turing implements further optimisations to the cache and share memory system, probably partly as a consequence of making more data available to these new processor components.

Due in part to this NVIDIA claim ~50% improved performance per core when shading, although not all that improvement will be immediately reflected in final frame rates.

NEXT-GEN MEMORY

In another industry first Turing debuts GDDR6 support, replacing GDDR5X VRAM seen on the high-end Pascal cards. This memory interface is considerably faster than GDDR5 and GDDR5X, rivalling HBM memory in the amount of bandwidth is supplies to the GPU. End-to-end optimization also lowers crosstalk, improving stability.

The higher effective memory bandwidth available to Turing GPUs – measured by NVIDIA to be on the order of 50% – will be particularly useful at higher resolutions and image quality settings. The GTX 1080 Ti was always a solid 4K gaming GPU with moderate image quality settings; just how far can the RTX 2080 Ti go?

VIRTUALLINK

Unveiled earlier this year by a consortium of stakeholders in the VR industry, VirtualLink is a new standard for single-cable connections to VR Head-Mounted Displays. In incorporates data, power and display lines into a single compact connector that’s a slight twist on the USB Type-C specification.

As well as USB 3.1 Gen2 data lines, the VirtualLink standard supports four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort and can supply up to 27 Watts of power. It will reduce the number of trailing cables between PC and HMD to one, and should also reduce cost over time.

The GeForce RTX 20-Series graphics cards are the first in the market to support the VirtualLink standard, well ahead of HMDs that are compliant with it. That’s certainly going above and beyond to future-proof the card, but we wonder if a header and front-panel-connector approach may not be the final iteration of this emerging standard.

You can read more about VirtualLink at https://sites.google.com/view/virtuallink-consortium/home

Features – DLSS

WHAT IS RTX?

Lets be clear: RTX does not mean ‘Real-time Raytracing’. This misunderstanding has been bubbling underneath the surface since Jensen’s original reveal of the new GPU architecture at Gamescom, and needs to be dispelled. RTX is in fact an umbrella term of a raft of new rendering techniques – some announced, some still in the pipeline – which rely on NVIDIA RTX-class hardware to execute. Think of it as being a bit like GameWorks, only the hardware it can be run on is even more restrictive.

To their credit, by making RTX part of the graphics card branding the end-user should be in an excellent position to know whether a particular feature will run on their hardware. At a time when we’re often critical of hardware manufacturers using opaque terminology and naming schema that can potentially confuse consumers, it’s really a breath of fresh air to see NVIDIA take this step.

NVIDIA’s Raytracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) are two of the techniques that sit under the RTX umbrella. These leverage RT Cores and Tensor Cores which together are hardware components currently unique to the Turing architecture.

DEEP LEARNING SUPER-SAMPLING

In today’s games a rendered frame usually isn’t the final image that you see on screen. This frame also undergoes post-processing to remove artefacts generated by the rendering process, the most well-understood of which is the jagged edges brought about by aliasing. These post-processing techniques, including anti-aliasing, are quite expensive computationally but cheaper than rendering at a higher than needed higher resolution and averaging the pixels down.

But how about instead leveraging the enormous power of Neural Networks to sharpen the image, perhaps even side-stepping many of the known weaknesses of traditional anti-aliasing techniques? Deep Learning Super-Sampling is just such a technique.

As it turns out image processing has been one of the early success stories for Neural Network development, a field that NVIDIA has lead with continued improvements to their hardware architecture and developer tools. Deep Learning Super-Sampling, or DLSS for short, begins before players even load up the game. The game developer supplies NVIDIA with a beta build of the game – it doesn’t need to be 100% bug-free, but should be able to render frames representative of the final in-game experience. NVIDIA use this to generate thousands of reference images, rendered at the ‘gold standard’ image quality of 64x supersampling.

“64x supersampling means that instead of shading each pixel once, we shade at 64 different offsets within the pixel, and then combine the outputs, producing a resulting image with ideal detail and anti-aliasing quality.”

These reference frames are used alongside raw captured images rendered at the same time to train a DLSS neural network which, when presented with a raw captured image, can generate an output that matches the 64x supersampled reference. The process of training the neural network is iterative, and utilises a technique known as back-propagation to adjust weights in the network with each iteration.

The final DLSS network is one that has learned to produce images which closely approximate the 64x supersampled reference, which is good. However it also sidesteps the problems of traditional anti-aliasing such as issues with transparencies and blurring, which is even better.

So that’s the hard part done, and it has only required the power of super-computer to do it. If you think super-sampling is hard, it’s got nothing on training a neural network. But the powerful aspect of DLSS is that this trained neural network can be shared and run on inferencing hardware, i.e. a GPU. You’re not training any more, and inferencing is much quicker.

So the DLSS network, trained for scenes in one or a narrow selection of games, is supplied to GPUs via the driver download system. When running the game the GPU takes each rendered frame and runs it through the DLSS network with a single input image as reference, outputting a finished image that’s far higher quality than the rendered frame. Plus, with NVIDIA RTX inferencing with the network is actually exceptionally fast as it leverages the Tensor cores of the Turing GPU.

Unlike some post-processing techniques DLSS needs a few tweaks to the game prior to implementation, and of course the DLSS neural network needs to have been generated by NVIDIA. At present there are two means to see it in action – the Epic Infiltrator demo, and a Final Fantasy DLSS demo. So far it’s been announced that developers from a multitude of studios are working to integrate it into 25 games:

– Ark: Survival Evolved from Studio Wildcard
– Atomic Heart from Mundfish
– Dauntless from Phoenix Labs
– Fractured Lands from Unbroken Studios
– Final Fantasy XV from Square Enix
– Hitman 2 from IO Interactive / Warner Bros.
– Islands of Nyne from Define Human Studios
– Justice from NetEase
– JX3 from Kingsoft
– MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
– PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds from PUBG Corp.
– Remnant: From the Ashes from Arc Games
– Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass from Croteam / Devolver Digital
– Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes
– The Forge Arena from Freezing Raccoon Studios
– We Happy Few from Compulsion Games / Gearbox
– Darksiders 3 by Gunfire Games / THQ Nordic
– Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna by KeokeN Interactive
– Fear the Wolves by Vostok Games / Focus Home Interactive
– Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice by Ninja Theory
– KINETIK by Hero Machine Studios
– Outpost Zero by Symmetric Games / tinyBuild Games
– Overkill’s The Walking Dead by Overkill Software / Starbreeze Studios
– SCUM by Gamepires / Devolver Digital
– Stormdivers by Housemarque

Features – Real-Time Raytracing

It’s no exaggeration to say that real-time raytracing is the holy grail of graphics rendering, but has been considered to be years, perhaps decades away from being realised. The issue is that it’s inordinately complicated and computationally expensive, to the extent that movie and animation studios dedicate years and whole supercomputers to just rendering high-fidelity raytraced images. Games instead rely on rasterization and post-processing techniques to do their best approximation of a raytraced scene simply in order to generate frames in real-time.

“Reflections”, A Star Wars UE4 Demo Featuring Real-time Raytracing

For all its speed, rasterization has a number of weaknesses. Chief among these are dynamic reflections and shadows, both of which require simplifications and algorithmic tweaks to look anything like realistic, and only tend to incorporate objects within the scene. And as you’ve probably noticed, improving the rendered quality of these aspects of a scene still tends to tank frame rates. If only ray-tracing could be performed at real-time, even operating on only a few elements of a scene, realism could be improved substantially.

NVIDIA have plenty of background in GPU-accelerated raytracing, and through NVIDIA Iray plugins and the Optix engine have for years been providing tools to industries that aid in the swift generation of realistic imagery. A breakthrough allowed Volta hardware to process a realistic raytraced scene in real-time, culminating in the first public debut of the now-famous Star Wars Reflections demo running on four Volta GPUs. But even this is a far cry from operating at 60+fps on a single GPU, as expected in modern gaming applications.

NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, as it happens, advances development further through the incorporation of new many hardware-based raytracing acceleration engines known as RT Cores. An RT core is present in each Turing Shader Module module, implicitly making it a scalable technology as the GPU increases in size from the TU106 to the huge 775mm^2 TU102. But the real trick is the use of Hybrid Rendering.

” RT Cores work together with advanced denoising filtering, a highly-efficient Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure developed by NVIDIA Research, and RTX compatible APIs to achieve real time ray tracing on single Turing GPU. RT Cores traverse the BVH autonomously, and by accelerating traversal and ray/triangle intersection tests, they offload the SM, allowing it to handle other vertex, pixel, and compute shading work. Functions such as BVH building and refitting are handled by the driver, and ray generation and shading is managed by the application through new types of shaders.”

Hybrid Rendering is a combination of both rasterization and real-time raytracing, the former used where it is optimal while the latter is used selectively where it would make the most visual impact. These could be reflections, shadows, refractions or other core elements that game developers feel is important to their game world; Battlefield 5 for instance utilises real-time raytracing to process reflections, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider apply the technology to shadows.

A critical aspect of Hybrid Rendering is that both rasterization and real-time raytracing pipelines operate in parallel rather than sequentially. Furthermore raytracing, just like rasterization, can have its complexity dialled back based on utilisation and available GPU horsepower. NVIDIA have developed de-noising filters (known as the NVIDIA Real-Time Ray Tracing Denoiser modules) which can greatly reduce the number of rays required per pixel to generate the desired visual impact, thus improving computational efficiency.

Microsoft have built raytracing into their DirectX Raytracing (DXR) extension of the DX12 API, and game engines will use these hooks to tap into NVIDIA’s hardware acceleration for raytracing. In theory it’s possible to use older GPUs for this application, but without RT cores rendering each frame would take an age; the RTX 2080 Ti is capable of processing rays 10 times faster than an GTX 1080 Ti. DXR is scheduled to roll out with the Windows Fall 2018 Update, after which games can implement the technology and NVIDIA can begin to unlock the functionality at the driver level.

So far eleven games have been announced to be incorporating elements of raytracing through DXR and NVIDIA RTX technologies:

– Assetto Corsa Competizione from Kunos Simulazioni / 505 Games
– Atomic Heart by Mundfish
– Battlefield V from DICE
– Control from Remedy Entertainment / 505 Games
– Enlisted by Gaijin Entertainment/Darkflow Software
– Justice from NetEase
– JX3 from Kingsoft
– MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
– Metro Exodus from 4A Games
– ProjectDH from Nexon’s devCAT Studio.
– Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes

Actual implementation into the finished game may not be immediate or on launch, but NVIDIA have been forthright in the opinion that developers are extremely excited by the scope of the technology. Also, implementation might be relatively straightforward in the grand scheme of things; the Shadow of the Tomb Raider developers apparently had only a few weeks to prepare their demo for Gamescom.

Of course, this only just skims the surface of NVIDIA’s new real-time raytracing technologies. NVIDIA have additional resources available if you’re keen on delving deeper.

Closer Look Video

For this review we’ve produced a video of ASUS ROG RTX 2060 Gaming. In this video we go into great detail about this graphics card, walking you through all of the features and detaching the cooler for a look at the thermal solution and innards. View the video here or watch below:

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming
NVIDIA RTX 2060
AORUS RTX 2080 XTREME
GIGABYTE RTX 2070 OC
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2070 OC
MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti OC
ZOTAC GAMING RTX 2080 Ti AMP
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
NVIDIA GTX 1070
AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

Special thanks go to Acermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

ACOUSTICS

We’ve experienced the Direct CU III cooler before and it doesn’t fail to disappoint this time round either – the sound emitted from this graphics card during load can be deemed as quiet and undisruptive.

Overclocking

To overclock our STRIX card we used ASUS’ very own GPU TWEAK II software.

In its out of the box condition, this graphics card has a GPU clock boosting to 1710MHz and the memory clock speed is left at reference 1750MHz. We were able to modify both parameters easily and achieved 1943MHz for the GPU clock and 1890MHz for the memory clock. This represents a 13% and 8% increase – a very respectful result which translates to an impressive performance lift in-game as shown below!

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a story-driven open-world RPG that immerses you in an epic adventure in the Holy Roman Empire. Avenge your parents’ death as you battle invading forces, go on game-changing quests, and make influential choices.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

The RTX 2060 is a more favourable option for gamers wanting a slice of the DXR action without having to break the bank and ROG’s variant of this new GPU is an exciting version which maximises in all of the key areas – performance, low-noise and low-temperatures.

The Direct CU III cooler has played a pivotal role in GPU production for a number of years and it has no problems in tackling the demand that an RTX-20 series graphics card throws at it. Not only does this thermal solution generate little noise but it also shaves off a respectable 10 degrees when comparing to NVIDIA’s Founders Edition – proving how efficient the overall design really is.

Out of the box, the STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming has a decent factory overclock applied to it – but only the GPU clock has been adjusted, the memory sits at default frequencies. In the real world, a small nudge in GPU clock speed provides us with between 4-8 extra frames, had ASUS pushed the envelope a little, we could benefit from even greater performance as noted in our manual overclock in this review. We managed to nudge up both the GPU and memory clock speeds quite significantly, highlighting how much headroom there is and that with such a modification, there are considerable performance gains to be had.

Being a ROG graphics card we have some additional features to take advantage of – the build quality is decent, the RGB lighting is extensive and the extra touches are useful. We get a dual BIOS switch, handy on/off lighting button, an RGB header and fan connect headers too.

However, we do have some reservations – the pricing on this model pushes it up as one of the most expensive RTX 2060s on the market. Priced at £428 GBP – $420 USD – $699 AUD, STRIX OC will have some fierce competition from other custom RTX 2060s, especially when those graphics cards can probably be overclocked to the same specification, for $100/£100 less.

The ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2060 Gaming is a great choice for 1080p/1440p gamers wanting a slice of next-gen features, but, pricing compared to other custom models may steer some away.

Pros
+ Sleek design
+ Great build quality
+ Ideal for 1080p/1440p
+ Low-noise with 0dB feature available
+ 10C cooler than Founders Edition
+ Each fan can be manually adjusted with GPU Tweak II
+ Allows for decent manual overclock
+ Extra features: fan headers, RGB header, BIOS switch, lighting switch
+ 2-year warranty

Cons
– One of the most expensive RTX 2060s
– No USB-C port

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Join in with the discussions on Discord