Getting a new GPU for a decent price is next to impossible thanks to the chip shortage, but Nvidia’s hoping to give customers some good news to close out the year.
The GPU giant was expected to launch a refreshed RTX 2060—a card that first launched in January 2019—a second lease of life in early 2022. The entry level offering was expected to ship alongside refreshed versions of the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080, cards that have been in exceedingly short supply all year due to their popularity.
But according to leaks from a variety of sources, including a Gigabyte listing on the Eurasian Economic Commission seen by VideoCardz, the revamped RTX 2060 will arrive before the end of the year.
Nvidia’s new RTX 2060: Specifications, release date
Nvidia hasn’t made any official pronouncements about the “new” RTX 2060 yet, although the current expectations are that it will largely deliver performance in line with the RTX 2060 SUPER.
The most consistent claim to date is that the updated RTX 2060 will ship with 12GB of VRAM, doubling the 6GB VRAM that the RTX 2060 first launched with in 2019. VideoCardz reported that the new model will still be manufactured on the older 12nm process. That should ensure that enough supply of the older cards can be manufactured to avoid the extreme price gouging seen over the last two years, although the fact that an almost three-year-old card is being remanufactured at all doesn’t bode well for PC builders as a whole.
It’s also been reported that the updated RTX 2060 will have 2176 CUDA cores, a marginal bump from the original RTX 2060’s 1920 CUDA cores. The card is expected to have a maximum boost clock of 1690Mhz, although it won’t ship with Resizeable BAR or PCIe 4.0 support—although neither would make a massive difference to the card’s performance given it is designed to serve as an entry-level offering.
One benefit for users is that at least the “new” RTX 2060 will be available soon. Leakers have reported that the refreshed RTX 2060 will be available from Dec. 7 internationally, a date that was later corroborated by French tech site Overclocking.
Nvidia’s new RTX 2060: Expected price
The big kicker with any GPU in 2021, of course, will be the difference between the recommended retail price and what retailers charge users.
The original RTX 2060 SUPER had an MSRP of $399/€379/$AUD599. Today you can find retailers selling the much older GTX 1660 Ti for about the same price. Given that the RTX 2060 first launched at $329 in the United States, it’s likely that Nvidia will want the re-released version to occupy a similar price point in their product stack. It would also give Nvidia an offering to undercut rivals AMD, at least until AMD launches their entry-level RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT GPUs in the new year.
Nvidia’s new RTX 2060: Expected performance
While Nvidia typically releases some internal testing with each new product—which is then quickly confirmed or contradicted by third-party benchmarks—the ‘new’ RTX 2060 is yet to be formally announced. However, based off the information publicly available, it’s likely that the new card will perform largely in line with the RTX 2060 SUPER.
That card was marketed as an ideal offering for those looking to play games mostly at 1080p, with some capability for 1440p gaming. The expansion of games supporting DLSS means the re-released RTX 2060 SUPER should be able to enjoy more games at the higher resolution.
One benchmark from YouTuber Gentleman, for instance, showed the RTX 2060 SUPER running at a reasonable average of 79-84 FPS in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1440p. The card was also capable of running Call of Duty: Warzone over 100 FPS at the same resolution, and games like Cyberpunk 2077.
Nvidia’s new RTX 2060: Where to buy
Because this is a refresh of a GPU that had previously been discontinued, it’s unlikely that Nvidia will sell their own models of the new RTX 2060 direct through their website.
Given that Gigabyte have effectively confirmed the GPU’s existence with their EEC filing, we can expect the new RTX 2060 will be available at all major retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, Amazon or Microcenter. You can also use third-party trackers, like GPUTracker in Europe, PC Part Picker or StaticICE in Australia, to keep an eye on how many retailers have stock — and how close the new cards stick to their MSRP.
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