Nvidia Might Resurrect the RTX 2060 With 12GB Of VRAM

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The GeForce RTX 2060 may be a bit outdated, but it's still one of the best graphics cards on the market, if you're open to buying a last-gen GPU. Nvidia seems to share the same opinion as a new rumor (via VideoCardz) suggests that the chipmaker isn't ready to pull the plug on the Turing-powered graphics card just yet.

According to VideoCardz's sources, Nvidia will revamp the GeForce RTX 2060 by endowing it with twice the memory as the original. The chipmaker has reportedly given its board partners a heads-up that the new GeForce RTX 2060 12GB may be ready by the end of 2021. Therefore, it's plausible that the new variant could debut in January 2022.

The GeForce RTX 2060 12GB allegedly utilizes the PG161 board, which coincidentally is the same board that's inside the Geforce GTX 1660 Ti. The revised mid-range Turing graphics card will continue to utilize the TU106 silicon and retain the majority of GeForce RTX 2060's specifications. The only compelling upgrade is the memory capacity that'll be upgraded from 6GB up to 12GB of GDDR6.

Earlier this year, Nvidia resuscitated the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti as stopgap solutions for the graphics card shortage. You can say what you want about the GeForce RTX 2060, but the Turing-based graphics card continues to be the second most popular graphics card on Steam. So, it doesn't surprise us one bit that Nvidia would want to keep the fire going.

The rumored GeForce RTX 2060 overhaul certainly isn't good news for gamers that want to pick up a GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics card. Odds are that the global semiconductor shortage will persist into 2022, which would explain why Nvidia would want to relaunch the GeForce RTX 2060 as a second option for consumers. Chip production should improve very soon as ABF substrate manufacturers are building new plants to increase production. Unfortunately, most of them won't be operational until 2022 so the shortage will still be an issue.