One of those comparisons that more than one user takes away the dream and is not for less. The appearance of a mid-range such as the one launched by NVIDIA in Turing put Pascal’s upper-mid range in check and also added Ray Tracing and DLSS, which together with the discount made by Huang’s to its most current model, leaves More than one biting their nails for the decision of whether to make the jump or not, who will win this fight between GTX 1080 vs RTX 2060?
It is a more complicated decision than it may seem, since it requires making a relatively medium or high outlay if we want to acquire a top model and although the sale of the GTX 1080 can alleviate that expense, the user in the end is looking for performance, is there really difference?
NVIDIA GTX 1080 vs RTX 2060, the eternal fight
With the Pascal card we are talking about a GP104-400-A1 chip manufactured by TSMC at 16 nm with 7.2 billion transistors and a 314 mm2 matrix, a considerable size. Surprisingly, although pure midrange, the RTX 2060 overcomes these figures with TU106-200-KA-10800 A1 consisting of millions of transistors 12 nm by TSMC, which also has a larger matrix 445 mm2.
It is what sharing a chip with the older brothers is, being you the youngest, where also, due to the greater surface area that its rival, it must be easier to dissipate its heat.
As for the chips themselves, the GTX 1080 gets 20 SM for 30 SM from the RTX 2060, which means 2560 Shaders, 160 TMU and 64 ROPs for the first and 1920 Shaders, 120 TMUs and 48 ROPs for the second, Somewhat disparate we might think, but the Turing card makes up for it with a larger L2 cache (4096 KB) compared to the Pascal card (3072 KB).
The frequencies is another section where the RTX 2060 loses, both in base frequency and in Boost ( 1607 MHz vs 1365 MHz and 1733 MHz vs 1680 MHz ), data that is partially compensated by the higher speed VRAM for the RTX.
Memories are less decisive due to the difference in buses
And it is that the GTX 1080 starts with GDDR5X at real 1251 MHz, while the 2060 does it with GDDR6 at 1750 MHz, a difference in favor of the second that is almost perfectly matched by the difference in buses between the two. The first being high-end has 256 bits while the second being mid-range is left with 192 bits, which gives total bandwidths of 320 GB / s for the GTX 1080 and 336 GB / s for the second.
Interestingly, the declared total power for both cards in FP32 is 8.8 TFLOPS and 6,451 TFLOPS , so on paper the Pascal-based graphics card should be considerably faster and easily outperform its higher-end rival. low.
It should be noted that both include PCIe 3.0 X16 as the main interface and that consumption is 180 watts for the oldest and 160 watts for the newest of them. Therefore, its maximum temperatures are also different, 89ºC as the limit for the GTX 1080 and 87ºC for the RTX 2060.
Which of the two GPUs to stay with?
It’s a great question, especially since TFLOPS aside (not a real measure of performance as we always say) performance is extremely even. According to the tests and tests that we have been doing and seeing their evolution over time and drivers, we can say that in general terms they are really at the same level.
These examples demonstrate that it is the game in particular that makes the difference for one or another card. The advantage comes from the side of the technical characteristics and the new technologies that only Turing supports: Ray Tracing and DLSS.
The first is not too feasible as such without the second asset, that is, we can play with Ray Tracing at Low, but if the game also supports DLSS we will not get a performance drop, but we can keep the same FPS or even increase any.
This gives you not only an advantage today, but an advantage for the future that the GTX 1080 will not be able to enjoy. So we have to opt for the RTX 2060 as the best present and future option, even having 2 GB less VRAM ( 8 GB vs 6 GB ), where now with the release in a few months of the RTX 3060 (no more than 8 or 10 months approximately) we can find the first one at lower or reduced prices, which is an incentive for change.