NVIDIA Resurrects 12GB Variant of RTX 2060 Super To Combat GPU Shortage

Last Updated on December 6, 2021 by Anu Joy

NVIDIA is finally resurrecting the RTX 2060 graphics card as promised earlier this year. The new avatar of the RTX 2060 will use the same TU106 GPU die based on TSMCs 12nm FinFET fabrication process, however, it will be packing in twice as much video RAM at 12GB compared to the 6GB configuration of the original 2019 release. The GPU is expected to hit the store shelves on December 7.

Interestingly, the original RTX 2060 shipped with 30 streaming multiprocessors (SM), but the upcoming re-release will feature 34 SMs instead. Going by the rest of the specifications, such as the CUDA/Tensor core count and base/boost clock speeds, it is clear that NVIDIA has chosen the Super variant of the TU106 GPU for the present re-release.

The reissued card is essentially an RTX 2060 Super with four extra gigabytes of VRAM. This isn’t surprising considering the GPU maker had focused on producing the Super variants prior to discontinuing the Turing GPU series with the launch of the RTX 30XX Ampere series last year.

That still makes the new 12GB version of the RTX 2060 about 15 percent faster than the plain vanilla RTX 2060. This should make it ideal for 1080p gaming (and even for older 1440p games) at medium detail levels. Just don’t expect to run modern ray-traced games without tanking the framerates, as the Turing cards weren’t very efficient at ray tracing.

Speaking to The Verge, an NVIDIA representative hinted at the graphics card costing more than the $349 MSRP of the original. The reason being two-fold. For starters, this is undoubtedly the more expensive Super edition of the GPU and secondly, the ongoing chip shortage has made MSRPs irrelevant. Although NVIDIA hasn’t revealed pricing information, expect it to come at a premium and the existing stocks to fly off the shelves quickly.

It is also unclear whether the re-issued graphics card will be a LHR (Lite Hash Rate) version to deter cryptocurrency miners. Such GPUs are factory limited to deter crypto-mining, but miners have nevertheless managed to undo most of those limitations either through driver hacks or through dual-mining methods.

Either way, expect miners to make a run for these cards as well, since the very same GPU is estimated to deliver returns at the rate of $3 per day on NiceHash as of this writing.