EVGA’s price squeezed Geforce RTX 2060 KO reaches RTX 2080 performance

When EVGA presented the price-pressed graphics card Geforce RTX 2060 KO during CES 2020, all attention ended up on the lower price tag. With cost savings, there were probably few who suspected that the new card would achieve significantly higher performance than a typical RTX 2060 card. A new report from Gamers Nexus indicates that this is precisely the case.

Steve Burke on Gamers Nexus explains the finding in video. It turns out that the card’s graphics circuit TU104, which is normally found in the sharper models RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080, is not as scaled-down as expected. The reason why EVGA equips its Geforce RTX 2060 KO with a much more capable circuit is probably that the company is offered defective TU104 circuits by Nvidia at a good price.

These may be defective computing devices that must be turned off, which means that the circuit does not qualify for a Geforce RTX 2070 or better. The fact that a company sells restricted versions of more capable graphics circuits is nothing new, but is applied by both Nvidia and AMD to maximize the utilization of manufactured circuits.

What stands out in the case of the EVGA Geforce RTX 2060 KO is that the strangled card retains much of the capacity of its more capable siblings. In Gamers Nexus tests, the EVGA card achieves a real advantage in a number of performance tests. The majority of these concern productivity-oriented tasks, as in-game performance is at the same level as a standard-configured Geforce RTX 2060 performs.

The largest gains are obtained in the Solidworks part of the test suite, where the EVGA card achieves 47 percent better performance in the test scenario Tesla Tower, compared to TU106 in a standard RTX 2060. Other scenarios in Solidworks show performance gains between 30 and 40 percent. Furthermore, performance results show that RTX 2060 KO renders 3D in the Blender application 27 percent faster.

When the RT cores are used, the advantage drops to 19 percent, which indicates that the floating point units have been ironed out. All results that ended up below the base level for RTX 2060 fall within the margin of error. In communication with Gamers Nexus, EVGA has indicated that the company intends to sell the Geforce RTX 2060 KO with the restricted TU104 circuit.

However, the fact that the circuit is used in all copies of EVGA’s cards cannot be guaranteed as it depends on the availability of Nvidia’s restricted circuits. In cases where the availability of simpler TU106 is greater, EVGA can choose to equip the cards with this circuit instead.

Despite more capacity at a lower price, Gamers Nexus are clear that the EVGA Geforce RTX 2060 KO does not offer any performance advantages over a standard configured RTX 2060 in terms of gaming performance. Anyone who renders graphics in Solidworks or Blender, on the other hand, gets a lot of performance for the money.

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