When rumors of a 12GB Nvidia RTX 2060 Super refresh started making the rounds, we said that they probably weren’t true. But it looks like we may have been wrong. Graphics card maker Gigabyte filed a new listing with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) that inadvertently confirms this card’s existence..
Twitter user @momomo_us uncovered the listing, which lists four Gigabyte graphics cards. Although the listing doesn’t call out the 12GB RTX 2060 Super by name, the model numbers all line up with previous Gigabyte RTX 2060 cards, with one notable change — 12GB of RAM. The GV-N2060WF2OC-6GD (Gigabyte’s Windforce RTX 2060), for example, is listed as GV-N2060WF2OC-12GD.
The listing comes amid mounting evidence for a refresh to Nvidia’s last-gen card. On November 14, a day before the listing went live, YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published a video saying that a 12GB RTX 2060 Super was on the way. This isn’t a channel that normally leaks new releases, but that, combined with the ECC filing and murmurs from around the community, has an 12GB RTX 2060 Super looking likely.
A dedicated leaking channel, Moore’s Law is Dead, revealed in October that the card would arrive in 2022 to take on low-end AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards. Rumors of Nvidia reintroducing the RTX 2060 in some form date back to January 2021, and they haven’t stopped since.
The question: Why? Nvidia released the RTX 3080 more than a year ago, so it’s a strange move to resurrect a GPU that’s more than two years old. There could be a good reason to bring it back, though. It’s no secret that graphics cards are tough to find right now, and Nvidia could be splitting its manufacturing efforts to get more cards out in the wild.
Evidence of the GPU shortage emerged when it was revealed that Nvidia was having manufacturing yield issues with its RTX 30-series graphics cards. Nvidia chose Samsung as its manufacturing partner, and reports circulating shortly after the launch showed that the manufacturer produced fewer usable chips than expected.
Samsung didn’t build the RTX 2060 Super — chipmaker TSMC did. TSMC is the semiconductor company behind AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors and Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards, as well as a longtime partner for Nvidia. It looks like Nvidia could be splitting its manufacturing to bypass supply chain issues.
That’s something the company did with its GTX 10-series GPUs. The range started on TSMC’s 16nm manufacturing process, but Nvidia eventually moved to Samsung’s 14nm process. Reintroducing the RTX 2060 Super allows Nvidia to quickly produce new cards on a node the company is already familiar with.
The strange bit is the 12GB of video memory. The RTX 2060 Super originally launched with 6GB, and doubling that to 12GB probably won’t do much for gaming performance. That’s something Nvidia’s RTX 3060 proved — even with 12GB of video memory, which is more than the RTX 3080, it performs below other cards in the range.
Unfortunately, an RTX 2060 Super refresh may not be enough to alleviate supply chain issues. Nvidia has been clear that it expects the GPU shortage to continue throughout 2022, so hunting down a graphics card will continue to be a practice in patience.
It’s also possible that the 12GB RTX 2060 Super won’t ever see the light of day. Although multiple sources have confirmed the existence of the card, it’s possible that Nvidia has shelved the idea. That’s something Nvidia already did with the 20GB RTX 3080 Ti, which was reportedly canned earlier this year.
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