NVIDIA To Launch A 12GB RTX 2060 On December 7th

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 01 December 2021, 06:12 pm

NVIDIA is launching yet another graphics card for this year, but it's not something entirely new.

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TAIPEI, TAIWAN - 2021/03/30: American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware, Nvidia logo seen in Taipei.

According to The Verge, Team Green is re-releasing the RTX 2060, but with a slight twist: it's going to have 12GB of VRAM instead of the original 6GB. The reason for this re-launch, according to NVIDIA, is to try and help alleviate the graphics card shortage.

The 12GB NVIDIA RTX 2060 is scheduled to launch on December 7th, though there's no starting price for it. But as per the original Verge report, the company considers it a "premium" version of the 6GB 2060, and they "expect the price to reflect that."

Back in 2019, the base model RTX 2060 was released for an MSRP of $349. Since NVIDIA considers its new 12GB model a "premium version," people might expect something close to around $450, give or take a few hundred bucks.

Furthermore, it was reported that the typical AIBs working for NVIDIA are also going to make their custom cards, though there's no news about this yet.

This will be the newest entry-level graphics card into the RTX series since there's still no RTX 3050/3050 Ti yet. But this won't be the first re-launch of 2060 this year.

Back in February, NVIDIA shored up the stocks of the entry-level Turing card along those of the Pascal-based GTX 1050 Ti for the same reason: to bump up stocks and help ease the GPU shortage a bit.

Whether this re-launch will actually have a positive effect on graphics card supplies, however, remains to be seen.

What's Under The 12GB NVIDIA RTX 2060's Hood?

Aside from the increased memory capacity, the new RTX 2060 also comes with a few other tweaks.

VideoCardz reports that the new card will be sporting a new die: a TU106 GPU instead of the original one's TU106-300. Clock speed is slightly lower at 1650 MHz compared to the original's 1680 MHz, but there will be more CUDA cores (2176), RT cores (64), and Tensor cores (136).

The TDP is also slightly higher at 184W compared to the 6GB model's 160W. What this means is that people might expect factory-overclocked models from AIBs to likely feature three-fan cooler designs to keep the GPU die cool.

These specs provided by VideoCardz are largely reminiscent of the RTX 2060 SUPER in a lot of cases. The only difference is the VRAM buffer, so maybe you should keep that in mind if you're going to buy a card soon.

What's The Point?

It's understandable that NVIDIA wants to help ease the GPU shortage a bit. But what's really the point of re-releasing something that's essentially an RTX 2060 SUPER but with 4GB more VRAM?

According to Tom's Hardware, the memory capacity is going to help a lot, specifically in this generation's demanding modern games. It's in these games that the original 2060's frame rates tend to tank when you push the sliders up.

It has been shown that graphics cards with 6GB of VRAM have been struggling a little bit in more modern games such as "Battlefield 2042" and "Cyberpunk 2077," largely due to high-quality textures being quite heavy on the memory.

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Written by RJ Pierce