Could this GeForce RTX 2060 price slash be Nvidia’s response to AMD’s RX 5600 XT?

(Image credit: Future)

Hold on to your ray-traced hats, because it seems like the graphics card wars might just be hotting up, with Nvidia perhaps responding to AMD’s launch of the Radeon RX 5600 XT by dropping the price of the GeForce RTX 2060 by a considerable margin.

Or at least this appears to be the case going by what Wccftech spotted at the EVGA booth over at CES 2020, namely a new EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO Edition graphics card carrying a retail price of $299 (about £230, AU$435).

That represents a 15% drop compared to the current recommended pricing of the RTX 2060 which is $349 (about £260, AU$510), and it obviously makes this GPU a more tempting potential purchase in terms of its value proposition.

Guessing game

How much we can read into this is debatable, and whether other RTX 2060 graphics cards might be in line for a similar price reduction is obviously something we can only guess at right now.

But it certainly seems feasible that this is the direction Nvidia could be looking in, particularly given that the RX 5600 XT has just rocked up at CES sporting some serious 1080p gaming chops (while being priced at $279 – which is about £210, AU$400).

And if EVGA is going to offer an RTX 2060 card at this lower price level, then other GPU manufacturers will surely feel pressure to follow suit with their baseline 2060 offerings to remain competitive, of course.

With the Radeon RX 5600 XT being shown to be more than competitive against the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (and indeed the GTX 1660 Super), perhaps Nvidia has decided to attack from above, as it were, and that now is the time to reduce the RTX 2060 to really run some serious interference with AMD’s fresh launch.

At any rate, whatever the underlying forces or motives at work here, this EVGA price reduction is obviously great news for consumers. Don’t forget that the RTX 2060 also brings ray tracing to the table, although in more demanding games, there are obviously caveats here for Nvidia’s lowest-powered RTX offering.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).