Last week at CES (opens in new tab), we saw EVGA's RTX 2060 KO (opens in new tab) graphics card, which was built to deliver Turing ray tracing (opens in new tab) goodness for under $300. It didn't take Nvidia long to send out a message to press saying that the RTX 2060 (opens in new tab) is now available for $299, citing their own Founder's Edition (opens in new tab) and EVGA RTX 2060 KO (opens in new tab) as examples. Now, it appears that Nvidia's add-in board (AIB) partners are doing the same.
The first sentence of Nvidia's notice is telling, as it reads: "In case you are currently testing the Radeon 5600 XT." AMD announced its Radeon RX 5600 XT (opens in new tab) just 10 days ago, pointing to new competition for the RTX 2060, as well as the $229 GTX 1660 Super (opens in new tab), as Nvidia also pointed out.
According to to AnandTech, the RTX 2060 price cuts "aren't wholly official." However, at the time of writing found two more RTX 2060 cards available for $299. These are the Gigabyte RTX 2060 OC (opens in new tab) after a $30 rebate and the Zotac RTX 2060 (opens in new tab) (after getting $20 off with promo code "VGAPCRW442").
We won't know how the RTX 2060 compares to other graphics cards (opens in new tab) on the market until we complete our own testing. However, some would argue that the GTX 1660 Ti is also an appropriate rival, since it's the same price as the RX 5600 XT at $279.
In any case, it should be an interesting match-up between the RTX 2060 and RX 5600 XT. The RX 5600 XT will have the price advantage, but the RTX 2060 comes with hardware-based ray tracing (opens in new tab) and is just $20 more.