If you're looking for a decent budget to midrange graphics card, this Asus RTX 2060 Cyber Monday deal on Amazon (opens in new tab) is about as good as we're likely to see. Priced at $179, down from a previous $279 and beating the former best price on an RTX 2060 of $219 by $40, this one will likely go fast. Note that you may have to click "other sellers" to get this price — it's not always the top option.
(opens in new tab)If you check our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, you'll see that the RTX 2060 performs a few percent faster than the RTX 3050 — and that applies to ray tracing games as well as rasterized games. That's largely thanks to its having a 192-bit memory interface and 336 GB/s of bandwidth, compared to a 128-bit interface and just 224 GB/s on the 3050.
It's not as fast as AMD's RX 6600 in rasterization games, though it does rank ahead of it for DXR (DirectX Raytracing) performance. Now that the RX 6600 $189 deal is gone, this is about as good as it gets for a "budget" GPU, and it will easily beat cards like the RX 6500 XT, GTX 1650, or Arc A380.
The RTX 2060 has had an interesting run of late. After EVGA announced it was exiting the GPU market, we saw the RTX 2060 drop down to $219 for a short time. Since then, prices have climbed back into the upper $200s, but for a time the RTX 2060 was the best value on an Nvidia GPU. It can now stake that claim again, as it's about $75 less than the RTX 3050 it still outperforms, and matches the lowest current price on an GTX 1660 — the GDDR5 non-Super model.
Turing has been out since 2018, and the RTX 2060 originally launched in early 2019. Four years later, we'd normally expect supply to be long gone, but the GPU shortages of the past two years have kept it in production. With cryptocurrency mining (on GPUs) now effectively dead for the time being, this should finally represent the end of the line for the venerable TU106 GPUs and the Turing Architecture.
