After a few months of rumors, Nvidia has fully confirmed the existence of the RTX 2060 12GB in the patch notes for its new one. Pilot ready to play 497.09 which is released today, with 497.09 being the first Nvidia driver to support the new graphics card. Will it be one of the best graphics cards? Probably not, but it’s potentially a slightly cheaper alternative to current RTX 3060 cards.

So far, all we have is official confirmation of the card, with no word from Nvidia on the actual specs. Obviously, it will have double the memory of the original RTX 2060 launched several years ago and remains the lowest level in the RTX series (unless you can use the mobile RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti). . We’re hoping to get a card for testing, to see what the added memory (and potentially other changed specs) do for its position in our GPU benchmark hierarchy.

Despite its age, the decision to create a new RTX 2060 with double the memory capacity of the original makes a lot of sense in today’s market. The 12nm TSMC process that the TU106 (possibly TU104) GPU in the RTX 2060 is relatively unused, making it a great untapped resource for Nvidia as the silicon shortage continues. At the same time, the RTX 2060 occupies a happy medium between the GTX 1660 Super and the RTX 3060. (Note that the image above is of the original edition of the RTX 2060 Founders; we think Nvidia won’t do. a new 12 GB FE, however.)

In that sense, we believe the RTX 2060 12GB will be Nvidia’s last entry-level graphics card for the mainstream gaming market. We might see RTX 3050 or RTX 3050 Ti cards in the future, but the mobile variants are crippled by a 128-bit memory interface with just 4GB of VRAM. The RTX 2060’s performance is perfectly adequate to serve as a mainstream gaming GPU, and doubling the memory should help it stay relevant longer.

What we don’t know are the final specs on CUDA core count and power consumption. Recent rumors have indicated that the RTX 2060 12GB might actually use the same CUDA die and core configuration as the 2060’s big brother, the RTX 2060 Super. However, the 192-bit bus width would remain the same, potentially making the RTX 2060 Super even faster than the 12GB 2060, despite having the same number of cores. But these are highly speculative rumors, so take them with the usual spoonful of salt.

Even if the RTX 2060 12GB only receives an increase in memory capacity and no more, the performance benefits could be very good. We’ve already seen the current 6GB model struggle in games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and particularly Battlefield 2042, where enabling all ray tracing features and increasing textures to their maximum settings will maximize more than the original 2060’s 6GB frame buffer and tank frame rates accordingly .

Interestingly, we saw a modified RTX 2060 that was upgraded to 12GB from Russian modder VIK-on. In a recent video, YouTuber Pro Hi-Tech took VIK-on’s RTX 2060 12GB and put it through some gaming and productivity tests to see if the improved memory capacity made a difference. He discovered that in productivity tasks and in Watch dogs: Legion, the performance of the RTX 2060 12GB was significantly better than that of the 6GB model, especially in the low 0.1% and 1% department.

Why release a 2060 12 GB now?

Nvidia has yet to announce an official date or MSRP for the new 2060 GPU, but some are claiming the cards will appear as early as December 7. That seems a reasonable expectation, given the card’s presence in the latest driver release notes. But there are other factors for Nvidia to release a warmed-up version of the RTX 2060 almost three years after the original card launched.

Earlier this year, at the height of the cryptocurrency mining boom, Nvidia announced its CMP cards, sporting a brand new “Cryptocurrency Mining Processor”. Except that these were only old Turing GPUs minus the video outputs, often sold at higher prices. After selling $ 300 million worth of CMP cards in the second quarter, CMP sales fell significantly in the third quarter. With declining profitability, miners had apparently decided that it was better to keep using consumer GPUs.

This leaves Nvidia potentially with excess Turing GPUs, so ironically, it’s not the gamers who are getting the leftover mining. Double the memory as a symbolic offer of improvements and we end up with the “new” RTX 2060.

We’d expect the graphics card to have an official MSRP somewhere south of the RTX 3060’s $ 329 asking price, but likely higher than the GTX 1660 Super’s $ 229 face price. Realistically, given that GPU prices on these two GPUs on eBay are currently around $ 700 and $ 525, respectively, we don’t expect many 12GB RTX 2060 cards to hit the market for less than $ 10. $ 500. The times we live in …

GeForce Nvidia 497.09 Driver Details

With the confirmation of the upcoming RTX 2060 12GB, 497.09 drivers are ready to play for Icarus, which comes with support for DLSS and ray tracing in the form of RTXGI. Game Ready support for both Chorus and Infinite halo has also been added to this version of the driver.

Six new G-Sync compatible monitors have also been added to Nvidia’s support list, including models from Dell, LG, MSI and Asus. Several major bugfixes were also fixed, including extreme gamma / contrast issues with YouTube and bugs related to Nvidia’s new Image Scaler update.

For more details, see the full patch notes here.