Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we are investigating claims that the RCX 2060 is a bad buy due to the fact that it only has a six gigabyte VM capacity the 2060 typically offers around gtx 1070 TI like performance but where is the 1070 TI and even the non TI model pack and a gigabyte memory buffer the 2060 gets just 6 e gigabytes so that means this is the fastest graphics card to ever come with just a 6 gigabyte memory buffer the previous king of that title would have been the geforce gtx 980ti and as far as I know the Maxwell flagship part has aged very well so at least up until this point the 6 gigabyte capacity hasn't been an issue the 2060 is only around 15% faster on average when compared to the gtx 980ti so while a lot of people are freaking out or at least a lot of people who comment on our videos I don't believe the six gigabyte vram buffer is really going to be an issue at least in the short term that said I did want to run a few more tests so here we are the first thing I wanted to do was report the peak VM allocation at 1440p in all the games we currently use to test GPU performance there's 37 games in total so this portion of the testing alone took more than a day and I have to admit watching vram allocation while playing around in these games for up to 10 minutes at a time that wasn't the most enjoyable experience before we look at memory usage it's important to note that we're really looking at allocation and not necessarily usage memory allocation sees memory reserved for storing data required by the GPU and some of that data allows the GPU to perform various calculations often games allocate more vram than is required as having the memory reserved ahead of time can improve performance a recent example this was seen when testing with Resident Evil 2 we often saw a vm allocation go as high as eight and a half gigabytes when testing the RT x20 atti at 4k but there was no performance penalty when using a graphics car with only six gigabytes of VRAM there was however a big performance penalty for using graphics cards with less than 6 gigabytes of vram so while the game would allocate around a gigabytes when available at the 4k resolution and appears to be using somewhere between four and six Q bytes and memory probably much closer to six gigabytes anyway here's a look at the 37 games we currently test with and here you can see how memory allocation differs between the r-tx 2016 and 2017 the 2070 of course having a larger 8 gigabyte memory buffer will allow for a greater amount of memory to be allocated if need be starting from the top we find our most memory intensive titles quake champions is a surprisingly hungry title though truth be told this game seemed to just allocate all the available memory I estimate usage is actually below 4 gigabytes purely based on what we've seen when testing rise of the Tomb Raider is another Hungary title but usage for this one is probably closer to the allocation figure and we've already discussed Resident Evil 2 and I suspect shut off the Tomb Raider is very similar to rise of the Tomb Raider beyond that though allocation does drop below 6 gigabytes we see 10 titles where allocation is between 5 & 5 & a half gigabytes with everything else allocating 4 gigabytes or or less now it's worth noting that almost all of these titles were tested using the maximum quality preset with some form of anti-aliasing enabled that being the case it's very easy to tweak the visual settings in most of these games to reduce memory usage without noticeably impacting the visual quality and I'll explore that a bit more in a moment moving on I've seen quite a few people now argue that cheering's improved memory compression makes all the difference when compared to Pascal so they're saying the 6 gigabyte 2060s memory buffer is technically larger than that of the gtx 1060 s this really isn't a valid argument for a few reasons one being of 2060 is over 50% faster than the 1060 and therefore will be expected to handle drastically higher visual quality settings and resolutions so I doubt any compression improvements are substantial enough to make up for that that said I was interested to see how this impacted memory allocation so once again I loaded up all 37 games this time using the gtx 1066 gigabyte to see what we hit for the peak allocation typically memory allocation was higher with the gtx 1060 there were a few tiles where half a gigabyte higher but for the most part we were only looking at a hundred to two hundred megabytes interestingly in warframe allocation was lower with the gtx 1060 I did reload the game a few times but receiver the same results each time so yes memory management for churring GPUs is better it's just not that much better okay so we've looked at memory allocation in a huge amount of games now I think it's about time we check out some performance numbers for this I will be comparing the RT x 2060 and 2070 and four of the more heavily memory allocated titles I suppose so the four most heavily memory allocated tiles that we came across were quake champions Resident Evil 2 and the tomb Raider's so I want to see how they scale from 1440p to 4k and then see if the 2060 is suffering from a lack of VRAM if it is the margin should obviously increase as we increase the resolution and in particular the frame time performance that should really take a nosedive first that we have quake champions are looking at the 1440p results we see at the RT X 2060 is just 7% slower than the 2070 when comparing the average framerate and just 5% slower for the point 1 percent lower result increase in the resolution we see that the 2060 is 9% slower for the average framerate and 8 percent slower for the 0.1% low frame time result so yes the margins did grow at 4k but nowhere near big enough to claim a VRAM issue for the RT x 2060 it's far more likely that this increases down to the higher core count GPU just being better utilized and less bottlenecked at the higher resolution moving on to rise of the Tomb Raider here we see the 2060 trailing by just a 4% margin at 1440p for the average framerate and 0.1% low result these margins are increased to 13% and 11% at 4k again you could quite easily just blame this on the 2066 key bite memory buffer but I would advise against that the 2060 packs 17 percent fewer cuda cores and therefore should be anywhere from 10 to 17 percent slower than the 2070 this means we're probably running into some kind of system Bowl neck at 1440p that's limiting performance of the 2070 in any case the RTA 2060 was just as smooth as the 2070 at both resolutions of course frame rates weren't ideal for either GP at 4k but they did offer a similar experience next up we have the newer tomb raider game shut all of the tomb raider and this is a fantastic looking title at 1440p the 2060 was 11% slowed off the average frame rate and 0.1% low moving to 4k we set the average frame rate margin increased to 16% but the point one percent low reduced to just 7% again no memory capacity issues here frame time performance for the 2060 was excellent and again it has 17% fuel recruiter cores so a 16 percent deficit in a heavily GPU bound scenario makes sense if you saw my recent 57 GPU Resident Evil 2 benchmark then you will have seen these results but for those of you who haven't let's quickly go over them so at 1440p the 2060 was 11% slower for the average framerate and 10% slower for the point 1 percent low result those margins change ever so slightly at 4k the 2060 is now 13 percent slower for the average frame rate but just 8 percent slower for the 0.1% low result again no evidence of running out of VRAM here for the RT X 2060 ok so it seems pretty clear that right now even for 4k gaming 60 gigabytes of vram really is enough of course the RT X 2060 isn't really powerful enough to game at 4k at least using maximum quality settings but that's not really the point of this video now I can already hear guys screaming at me that the issue isn't about gaming today it's about gaming tomorrow like much later tomorrow I believe the argument is something like yeah the 2060 is ok now but for future games it just won't have enough vram and while I don't have a functioning crystal ball I know this is going to be both true and not so true at some point games are absolutely going to require more than 6 gigabytes of vram for maximum quality settings the question is by the time that happens will the RT X 2060 be powerful enough to provide playable performance using those quality settings it's almost certainly not going to be an issue this year I doubt it'll be a real problem neck yeah in three years time maybe you might have to start managing some quality settings then four years probably probably start to become a problem and I'd say in five years time it will almost certainly be a problem we can look at AMD's fiji gps as an example of aging poorly juda limited vram The Fury series was released back in mid 2015 with just four gigabytes of HBM memory the fury acts was to compete with the gtx 980ti and the GeForce GPU packed a slower but larger six gigabyte buffer just three years later the fury axe was struggling to keep up with the 980ti and modern tiles of 1440p using high quality textures we recently saw the fury ax struggling in resident evil 2 so much so that it was slower than even the rx 580 and the experience wasn't even comparable whereas the rx 580 with it a gigabyte vram buffer offered silky smooth gameplay the fury ax was a stuttering mess that said while the fury X can't handle Resident Evil 2 with the max preset enabled you can manage the quality settings for smooth performance dropping the quality preset from max to graphics priority reduce the memory allocation from 7 gigabytes at 1440p and this was enough to revive the fury X honestly image quality really wasn't that different certainly wasn't noticeable but what was was the gaming experience used in the fury X whereas the RT X 2060 only sees a 17% boost to the average frame rate the fury X is a massive 40 percent performance increase however it's the frame time performance that's massively improved here we see a 97 percent increase for the 1% low and 61% for the point 1 percent low and most crucially the frequent stuttering is now gone in fact I didn't notice any stuttering at all so whereas the fury X was 27% slower than the RT X 26 to use in the max preset and basically unplayable due to stuttering with the slightly lower graphics priority preset enabled the fury X was just 14 percent slower and offers a similar experience in terms of smoothness anyway as it stands right now the GeForce r-tx 2060 has enough vram to power through today's games using the maximum quality settings and as a GPU targeting 14 40p gaming or maybe extreme high refresh rate gaming at 1080p and just fit the bill nicely at least in terms of performance I think we can all agree that eight gigabytes of gddr5 an RT X 20 60 second hand in two or three years time I would certainly benefit from having that extra vram but for those buying one of these right now I don't think it really makes much difference doesn't seem to be an issue right now as we just saw from all the testing and I think people are sort of beating this up to be a much bigger issue than it is for the RT X 2060 I also doubt you'll run into much trouble over the next few years and of course if you do it is very easy to solve it's not like having not enough cores on a CPU you can't really do much about that in games like Battlefield 5 it's going to stutter and you're gonna have issues if you don't have enough cause there isn't a setting you can reduce that takes the load of having not enough cause at least not enough anyway getting sidetracked still I will be keen to see how the RT X 2060 travels over the next few years I'll certainly be closely monitoring its performance against the RT X 2070 and Vega 56 for now though that is going to do it for this one if we did enjoy the video be sure to hit the like button for us that is much appreciated subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work we do at our box then consider supporting us on patreon you will gain access to our discord chat and monthly live streams thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time