Based on its$350 MSRP, the RTX 2060 comes at a cost of $4.06 per frame.
Can you notice a trend on the graph above?
Anything mid-range or better will set you back more than it ever has before.
There are a few factors worth considering.
Are today’s GPUs more complex than they were a few years ago?
Have manufacturing costs increased?
Also, is more investment being made into research and development?
The answer to that one is unquestionably yes.
Overall power efficiency hasn’t changed much since Pascal and AMD’s hardware is at a clear disadvantage.
But that’s not the situation we find ourselves in, at least for now.
Currently high-end graphics cards are essentially an all Nvidia-affair.
Then we have theRTX 2080for $700.
This GPU is stepping in for the GTX 1080 Ti offering essentially the same performance for the same price.
And theRTX 2070, which is 5-10% faster than the GTX 1080 for the same price.
GTX 10 GPUs are now two years old, of course.
After two years we’d expect at least a 30% boost in performance for the same money.
The other way to look at this is that it’s a result of current market conditions.
Nvidia keeps raising the bar in an experiment to see what gamers are willing to pay.
But then we have the competition… the competition that is there to help drive pricing down.
But AMD has been fairly absent outside of the budget and mid-range GPU game for quite some time.
Vega 64 graphics cards arescarcely availableand have been ever since release.
There’s just a handful of AIB models and most are very expensive.
Then we have models from MSI, Gigabyte and Sapphire all priced upwards for $550.
That’s more than a baseRTX 2070which generally is the better offering.
For an RTX graphics card this is a massive win.
That won’t make it an instant upgrade if you already own a fast enough graphics card.
At $350 it eliminates the $500 RTX 2070 which is just ~11% faster.
It’s also a better choice than Vega 56 and all the Pascal cards priced over $300.
Cons:RTX features remain an unknown, particularly with reduced RT cores.
Not a GTX 1060 drop-in replacement, drivingmuchbetter performance along with a larger price tag and more power consumption.
