In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 16 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). I also slipped in a few variations on the same games for comparisons like DX11 to DX12, OpenGL to Vulkan, and a couple of games are just tested at their highest setting and lower but still high detail options to show the performance difference when things are turned down slightly. In total, each video card is tested 75 times and that makes for a huge mess of graphs when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start off with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read the result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors. This covers all of the games tested except Final Fantasy XV that we have a score rather than an FPS because they like to be different.

So how did the RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition perform? In short, really good. At 1080p it had four games up over 120 FPS and a whopping 15 in the 60-119 range. The two outliers were the two in the 30 to 59 range. As usual one of those was Ashes of the Singularity at 56.5 FPS which is always much lower than the average FPS. The second was the newly added Metro Exodus game at ultra detail which at 59.23 FPS was extremely close to moving into the next bracket. At 1440p there were still three up over 120 FPS and 13 over 60 FPS and 5 under 60. Given the 2060 SUPER basically came in between the RTX 2070 FE and the RTX 2070 running at the reference speeds I’m not surprised that 1440p performance is looking good, not perfect but smooth in most games. Then at 4k, you can see a dropoff where we now have most games running below 60 FPS and two under 30 FPS. This was an improvement over the RTX 2060 FE though which only had two in the 60 FPS range previously and had 3 under 30 FPS. You can see in both 4k and 1440p where the increased VRAM capacity and controller size have helped when we get into the higher resolution games at high detail settings.

Before getting into the detail results I did want to take a look at Final Fantasy XV which doesn’t use FPS scores so I couldn’t include it in with the others. I tested this one twice once using the high detail setting and again taking a look at DLSS performance. In the normal test, the 2060 SUPER came in below the RTX 2070 FE, big shocker right? This also meant it was ahead of the 1080 with 11 Gbps memory and well ahead of the Vega 64 as well. In the DLSS vs TAA test, the result was similar as well but notice how big the jump is between the RTX 2060 models to the 2060 SUPER.

If you are crazy like me and love looking through all of the detail results, I have even more than normal with the addition of four new titles into my testing. These will eventually be replacing a few of the older titles but right now there is some overlap. Looking through everything though there are a few takeaways. For starters, the 2060 SUPER seems to fall directly in between the RTX 2070 FE and the RTX 2070 that was running the stock clocks (remember Nvidia brought out that cheaper RTX 2070 for a while at launch that ran at a slower speed than the OCed and FE models). The only exception was in AOTS which the 2060 SUPER was a little behind and that was enough to keep it below 60 FPS on that specific test. DX12 performance, just like I have seen with other Turing based cards was better than DX11 and Vulkan performed well but AMD sees a bigger jump in Vulkan based games.