Nvidia’s reportedly planning to re-introduce its RTX 2060 with a 12GB memory upgrade

For the past year, the GPU market has suffered from major supply issues. Simply put, demand has skyrocketed over the past year thanks to growing demand for next-generation gaming hardware. Beyond that, high demand from creators, cryptocurrency miners, and scientific users has pushed these demand levels to insane heights. 

According to Videocardz, Nvidia is working on a new version of its RTX 2060 graphics card, refreshing the GPU with a larger 12GB frame buffer to help satisfy the market’s demand for new products. This could mean that Nvidia has shelved its plans to release 8nm Sub-RTX 3060 Ampere products outside of the notebook market, saving their precious 8nm wafer allocations for their higher-end products. 

This report paints a grim outlook for 2022’s GPU market, as Nvidia’s RTX 2060 is a product from 2019. Nvidia reportedly plans to release its RTX 2060 12GB GPUs in early 2022. If these 12GB RTX 2060 reports are true, Nvidia plans to release a new RTX 2060 model three years after the original launch in January 2019.    

Nvidia’s RTX 2060 graphics card is built using Samsung’s older 12nm process technology. As such, these graphics cards can be manufactured without using Samsung’s 8nm process tech. With their refreshed RTX 2060 GPUs, Nvidia will increase their supply of mid-range graphics cards without taking manufacturing capacity away from its other product lines. The only way for the GPU market to be “fixed” is to increase supply; this is Nvidia’s way of achieving this. 

Will this lead to lower GPU prices? 

Ideally, AMD and Nvidia would simply manufacture enough RTX 30 series and RX 6000 series products to satisfy today’s market. Sadly, the world is not that simple, and Nvidia’s RTX 2060 is ideally positioned to help Nvidia increase its supply of graphics cards. 

Nvidia’s RTX 2060 sits directly below Nvidia’s RTX 3060, and with a 12GB memory upgrade, it would be able to deliver everything that modern gamers need to create a great mid-range gaming PC. Nvidia’s RTX 2060 supports the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set, including ray tracing, and supports Nvidia’s DLSS technology. The graphics card also features the same video encoder as Nvidia’s latest Ampere graphics cards, making it a great GPU for video editing and content creation. For many customers, a refreshed RTX 2060 12GB graphics card would be an excellent purchase.