RTX 2060 Vs RX Vega 56 [Gaming Comparison]

AMD and NVIDIA rivalry has always been interesting, and as we see a slow decline in prices for graphic cards manufactured by these two companies, it’s the perfect time to get an entry-level GPU. Among the various graphic cards manufactured by AMD and NVIDIA, you might have heard of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and the slightly less popular AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. In this RTX 2060 vs Vega 56 Graphics Card comparison, we’ll be comparing the specifications, benchmarks, and prices of both GPUs to find which is worth buying in 2022.

 Also read: GTX 1650 vs RTX 3050

RTX 2060 vs RX Vega 56 Specifications 

 Background Difference

As NVIDIA unveiled their first set of RTX 2000 graphic cards, the name NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 became a popular entry-level GPU for anyone who wanted to try out NVIDIA’s new ray tracing and DLSS technologies for themselves at cheaper rates. NVIDIA’s NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is a high-end GPU built for extreme gaming on high settings.  

Built on Turing as its base architecture, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 holds 10.8 billion transistors on its 444 mm2 chip. Moreover, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has 6GB of GDDR6 memory that is connected by a 192-bit memory bus and a bandwidth of 336 GB/s. 

Moreover, the GPU carries 2176 CUDA cores and a base core clock of 1365 MHz which can be boosted up to 1680 MHz on its TU106 GPU.  

Alongside that, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 also features 1920 shading units, 120 texture mapping units, and 48 render output units. It also includes 240 tensor cores for deep AI learning and 30 RT cores for real-time ray tracing technology. 

Being a high-end graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, allowing it to play all modern and upcoming games with real-time ray tracing and DLSS technologies.  

About the power requirements of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, it has a rated TDP of 160 W which means it requires a good PSU to fulfill its power requirements. Moreover, it has an additional 8-pin power connector to draw power alongside a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.  

On its release, the MSRP was 349 USD, but the production of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has been discontinued to make room for the RTX 3000 series. In the end, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 will remain future-proof for only a small, but it’s still quite a powerful graphics card that can run all modern titles without any problems.  

Related: RTX 2060 vs 3060

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Background

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is half a decade-old graphics card that was released in August 2017 and has aged quite well since its release. It’s the most popular one of the three Vega series graphics cards released by AMD and can run most modern games at high settings. 

With its GCN 5.0 architecture as the base, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 consists of 12.5 billion transistors on its 495 mm² chip and 14nm process. It also has a greater memory size of 8GB and HBM2 memory type, which, albeit slower than the GDDR6 for gaming, is still a very powerful memory type. Moreover, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 operates on a 2048-bit memory bus, which is only suited for the HBM memory type.  

As for the GPU, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 has a GPU base clock speed of 1156 MHz which can be boosted up to 1471 MHz. With 3584 CUDA cores, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 for its core count. However, since it doesn’t have AMD RT cores, it doesn’t support raytracing. 

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 has support for all APIs used in modern games and programs, including DirectX12, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.2. As for its rendering capabilities, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 consists of 64 ROPs, 224 TMUs, and 3584 shading units alongside 16 KB L1 cache and 4MB L2 cache 

As is the case with most AMD graphic cards, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is quite a power hungry with its 210 W TDP, so you will need a powerful PSU to run it with your system. It’s connected to the rest of the system with the standard PCIe X16 slot and draws power from its 2x 8-pin power connectors.   

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56’s price at launch was 399 USD, and AMD ceased production of these chips in June 2019. Even today, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 can play all modern and upcoming titles with ease at 1080p resolution however, these graphic cards aren’t anywhere close to being as popular as the RTX 2000 series. 

Gaming Benchmarks 

For the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU comparison, we’ll be doing benchmarks of modern gaming titles at 1080p resolution on the highest settings. From these tests, we’ll find which GPU outperforms the other in terms of FPS, power efficiency, temperatures, and more. All the benchmarks mentioned in this comparison were obtained from YT/Testing Games.  

Test PC 

OS: Windows 10 Pro  

CPU: Intel i7 8700k 3.7Ghz  

Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z390-F Gaming  

GPU: GeForce RTX NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB / Radeon RX AMD RADEON RX VEGA 56 8GB  

RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM 3200Mhz 

The above build was used for benchmarking NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. Since the Intel i7 8700k is a powerful processor, it will run nicely with both high-end GPUs. With the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, it has GPU 2.9% bottleneck for general tasks, and as for the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, it is rated at a 2.4% GPU bottleneck. Moving on to the motherboard, the Asus ROG Strix Z390 is great for making sure all components run stably on the system, and the 16GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM pairs nicely with the CPU and GPU. Overall, if you want to play games being released today at 1080p high resolutions, this rig will do just the job. 

Resident Evil 2

Starting the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 comparison, we have the Resident Evil 2 Remake. Resident Evil is a franchise most gamers interested in the horror genre are accustomed to, and its second entry received a remake in 2019 built on a modern engine and graphics. While the game has stunning visuals, it has also been optimized nicely to run on mid-tier builds. For this reason, the Resident Evil 2 remake was tested on 1080p resolution at the highest settings.  

For the Resident Evil 2 benchmark, we can observe the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 reaching very similar FPS and temperatures. Although the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 does have a slightly higher temperature than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, it has an average of 3% higher FPS.  

Moreover, if we look at the FPS drops, we can see that the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 was more stable at a 1% low FPS drop of 81 FPS compared to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060’s 78 FPS. We can see the same pattern with the 0.1% low FPS drops, with the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 being ahead by 3 FPS. So overall, for Resident Evil 2, you will find the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 outputting slightly higher and more stable frame rates than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060.  

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

The second game on our list, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, is the 11th entry in the franchise developed by Ubisoft, and much like other Ubisoft games, it’s not optimized for running well on PC. Here you’ll see a significant drop in FPS compared to other games on this list, while the visual quality isn’t that much better. To run this game at max settings, you will need a high-end GPU and CPU along with a good amount of RAM. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested at 1080p resolution at high settings with the game’s own benchmarking tool. 

With Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, we can see a much larger difference put between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 coming out on top. Here we find the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 was 20% faster at outputting frames than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 while reaching a slightly higher temperature of 63 °C. We can credit this large FPS difference in favor of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 thanks to the long partnership between Assassin’s Creed and NVIDIA, to the point where Assassin’s Creed games are almost tailormade for the NVIDIA graphics cards.  

Another thing to note is the 1% low FPS drops where the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 dropped exactly 9 frames compared to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, which went down 3 frames. This implies that the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 was operating at more stable frame rates than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. However, even the 1% lows of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, which was 52 FPS, were greater than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56’s average frame rate of 49 FPS.     

Battlefield V

Battlefield V was released back in 2018 as the 11th entry into the main Battlefield franchise. While the game had a lot to offer, it ultimately ended as a flop because the developers didn’t stay grounded in reality, which resulted in bad reception by the fans. The game is well optimized for gaming on PC but leans more towards being CPU intensive rather than GPU. Battlefield V was tested at 1080p on the highest settings, with the gameplay recorded for average FPS.   

In Battlefield V, it can be observed that the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 was outputting a slightly higher frame rate than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. Overall, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 had a 6% higher average frame rate than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 while operating at slightly cooler temperatures. 

Regarding 1% low FPS drops, we can notice that both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 fell down almost the same number of frames, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 dropping to 71 FPS, whereas the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 dropped to 74 FPS. So for playing Battlefield V, you can expect a slightly higher frame rate coming from the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060.  

Forza Horizon 4

After the success of Forza Horizon 3, Playground Games released two more installments into the Forza Horizon series, including Forza Horizon 4, in 2018. With stellar graphics and gameplay mechanics, Forza Horizon 5 quickly became one of the best racing games on the market. Forza Horizon 4 benchmark was done at 1080p resolution with the highest settings on the engine.  

Looking at Forza Horizon 4 benchmark, we can again see the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 reaching a few frames higher rate compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. To be precise, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 was rendering 7% the number of frames than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. There’s also very little difference in temperatures between the two graphic cards.  

We can also see that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 dropped down to 79 FPS compared to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56’s 81 FPS. So both GPUs almost fell down 10 frames in case of 1% low FPS drops. So, in the end, for playing Forza Horizon 4, you’ll find the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 performing 7% better. 

Hitman 2

Hitman 2 is a 2018 stealth game developed by IO Interactive that quickly became one of the best installments in the Hitman franchise. It served as the sequel to the Hitman 2016 game, which was also received well by the public. The Hitman 2 benchmark was done in 1080p resolution at the highest settings for the best comparison between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56.   

As you can see in the Hitman 2 benchmark, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is performing slightly better than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 while being a little warmer. Overall, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 rendered a 5% higher average frame rate than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. This is in contrast to previous games on the list, excluding Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. This is also because these games have more support for NVIDIA’s drivers than AMDs.  

Furthermore, if we look at the 1% low FPS drops, we can see that both GPUs fell down to 59 FPS, which means the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 fell down 23 frames, whereas the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 dropped down 19 frames. This gives AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 a slightly stabler frame rate over the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060.  

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V or GTA V is a game almost everyone has at least heard of for being one of the best open-world games set in the modern world. Rockstar is known for optimizing their games well so they can even run-on low-end machines, which makes the game less CPU and GPU intensive. Moreover, the game was released back in 2013, so it’s not hard to find hardware that can run it smoothly. GTA V was tested at 1080p resolution at the highest settings.  

If you look at the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark, you’ll see the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 reaching a much higher frame rate than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, with a difference of 17 frames. This means that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 was 17% faster at outputting frames than AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. You can credit this huge difference to the MSAA antialiasing method, which isn’t suited for Vega and Polaris cards, as well as more support for NVIDIA drivers. 

Also, looking at the 1% low FPS drops, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 dropped to 65 FPS, which is a 35 FPS drop from its average frame rate. Similarly, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 dropped to 55 FPS, which is a similar 28 FPS drop, even if it’s a bit more stable.   

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Moving on to Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of the best adventure games out there, we can expect a similar difference between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 in games released after 2017. Overall, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a stunning game that was tested on the game’s own benchmark at 1080p high settings.    

To talk about Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the benchmark shows the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 has a slightly higher average FPS compare to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. This shows that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 had a 5% higher average FPS in comparison. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, being a more recent graphics card, gets the edge over the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 in such games.   

Talking about the 1% low FPS drops, you’ll see that there’s actually higher FPS in 1% lows than the average FPS. This is because the frame rate remains fairly high at the start of the benchmark; however, once it pans to crowds and other models, the FPS drops significantly. So at the end of the benchmark, the 1% low FPS drops for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is at 68 FPS, whereas the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 dropped down to 67 FPS.  

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is another popular entry into the Far Cry game series developed by Ubisoft. It’s a first-person shooter game with great gameplay mechanics, an engaging narrative, and breathtaking visuals. Overall, the game was a huge success when it came out in 2018. Like other games on the list, Far Cry 5 was also tested at 1080p resolution at the highest settings with its own benchmarking tool.  

Far Cry 5 has been a demanding title to run, but the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 both manage to reach 101 FPS on the game at high settings. With virtually no difference between the FPS, the Far Cry 5 benchmark shows there’s no clear winner between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 if we talk about performance alone.    

In case of the 1% low FPS drops, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 comes out ahead with 80 FPS compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, which fell down to 74 FPS. However, the 1% lows can further go down as the benchmark continues.  

The Witcher 3

Being the last game on the list, the Witcher 3 is an action RPG game developed by CD Projekt, which became a worldwide hit when it came out in 2015. Everything from its gameplay and mechanics to its story and visuals is incredible. Being quite an old game, it can run on most machines and doesn’t require a lot of GPU and CPU power to do so because it is well optimized. The Witcher 3 was also tested at 1080p resolution with all settings maxed out.       

As we can see in the Witcher 3 benchmark, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 reached a 6% higher number of frames than the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. Also, the temperatures and GPU usage were almost the same for both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56.   

Lastly, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and 1% low FPS drops both have similar FPS drops, with both GPUs coming down to 89-91 FPS. This is too small a difference to take seriously, considering both had very similar average frame rates.  

Final Thoughts 

In this NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 comparison, we compared the specifications, backgrounds, benchmarks, and more to find the best graphics card available right now. Before giving a verdict, let’s get some facts out of the way.  

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is a much more recent card compared to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 and has more driver support. It also comes with real-time raytracing and DLSS technologies which the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 lacks. But even so, on most games that were tested, there was almost no difference in performance between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. 

In 3 out of 9 games that were tested, AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 had an average 3-6% higher frame rate over the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. Contrastingly, with the other 5 games, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 came out on top at an average 3-6% FPS difference. Outliers such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and GTA V had a much higher difference in FPS, with 17% and 20% higher frame rates. In Far Cry 5, both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 were tied at the same average FPS count.    

In any case, the performance difference between NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 was almost unnoticeable, which brings it to the price. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is the better choice here if you need better driver support as it’s a more recent graphics card, but if you can find the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 for cheaper in your country, then we’d recommend you buy it. With that said, both GPUs performed great on all the games that were tested and can handle recent releases and upcoming games for quite a while.