At the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which opened on January 7, 2019, Nvidia unveiled the next-generation RTX 2060 6Gb graphics card based on the new Turing architecture. This graphics card belongs to the mid-price segment and will replace the previous-generation GTX 1060 graphics card, which is popular among miners and gamers.

In terms of gaming performance, the Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card is equivalent to the previous-generation GTX 1070 or even the GTX 1070Ti. We, of course, are most interested in the new card's capabilities for cryptocurrency mining and whether the RTX 2060 can become a full-fledged replacement for the GTX1070 or even the GTX1080. To do this, we will compare the main specifications of these graphics cards and try to imagine, based on this data, what the RTX 2060's performance in mining will be.

Based on the graphics cards' specifications, the RTX 2060's memory bandwidth is higher than that of the GTX 1080, and its performance in FP32 integer operations is on par with the GTX 1070. From this it follows that the Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card in memory-intensive Ethereum mining will be on the level of the GTX1080 with the OhGodAnETHlargementPill utility or even slightly higher — around 35-40 Mh/s. In other algorithms that depend only on GPU performance (Raven, Monero, BitcoinGold, SUQA), the new card will consistently exceed the figures of the higher-end GTX1070 model. Over time this difference in performance between the graphics cards of the two generations will only increase, since with each new version of their software, developers of mining software manage to squeeze much more hashrate out of RTX20xx graphics cards than out of GTX10xx.

Among the drawbacks of the RTX2060, it is worth noting its high power consumption for this class of graphics card. In mining, by this metric, the new card will be equivalent to its higher-end RTX2070 model.

On the Ethash algorithm, the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 6gb graphics card will show excellent results in mining even taking into account its inflated price, but if Ethereum changes its mining algorithm to another one or switches entirely to PoS, then the new card will lose its advantage over the GTX1070 and buying such a graphics card for mining will become not the most profitable option.

Tests of the RTX 2060 in mining were also conducted on various software. The most popular miners with support for Nvidia graphics cards were taken for testing: Claymore`s Dual Ethereum, Bminer, NBMimer, Z-enemy, CryptoDredge, Gminer, Zjazz, T-REX, TTminer. Testing was carried out at stock frequencies without overclocking and without changing the memory and GPU voltages.

Testing showed that on some algorithms (Ethash, PHI2 and others) the mining results on the RTX 2060 graphics card are slightly better than on the GTX 1060. For the other algorithms, mining either did not start at all or the results were at the level of the GTX 1070.

Based on the results of the tests conducted on various mining software, it can be assumed that the beta version of the driver is to blame for everything, or that modern miners for Nvidia are written not for a specific architecture, as was the case earlier, but for a specific graphics card model. That is, to find out the real performance of Nvidia Geforce RTX2060 graphics cards in mining, one will have to wait until the card goes on sale and miner programmers are able to optimize their products for the new Nvidia card.