Nvidia’s revamped RTX 2060 GPU could be faster than we expected

Nvidia’s rumored new RTX 2060 might be a more powerful resurrection of this Turing graphics card than we expected, going by the latest speculation.

Previously, the rumor mill has held that the only difference with the new RTX 2060 – providing it does exist, and comes out on December 7 as predicted – will be that it doubles up the VRAM from 6GB to 12GB.

Now VideoCardz is saying – and claiming confirmation from three separate sources, but we should remain skeptical of any rumor, of course – that the incoming RTX 2060 will not just run with 12GB, but will also up the CUDA core count to 2,176. That would put it on a par with the RTX 2060 Super, and clearly be a nice boost to its power level (remember that the original RTX 2060 ran with 1,920 cores).

It’ll also have a TDP (power usage) of 184W which is actually a touch more than the 175W consumed by the RTX 2060 Super. The boost clock has been pegged at 1650MHz by default, at least going by two sources.

The upshot is that the refreshed RTX 2060 should be equivalent to the old 2060 Super, but with a touch more power consumption, and a stingier memory bandwidth (192-bit, rather than the 2060 Super’s 256-bit bus).

Analysis: A delicate GPU balancing act for Nvidia

This is an interesting one considering that rumors about the new RTX 2060 have been flying about for some time now, all insisting that it will maintain the same spec as the original 2060, save for doubling the VRAM. And now, with the launch supposedly imminent – as mentioned, the refreshed card will theoretically arrive the week after next – we discover that it could be more in line with the 2060 Super, or at least pretty close.

That seems a little odd considering it would bring performance quite close to the RTX 3060, which, as VideoCardz points out, is something in the order of only 8% faster than the RTX 2060 Super.

We’d imagine that there would have to be a more substantial difference between a new 2060 and the RTX 3060, particularly when you consider that Nvidia is reportedly planning a desktop RTX 3050 of some kind – and this has to fit into the overall range as well. We can’t rule anything out, obviously, and this fresh rumor does marry with the assertion from yesterday that the theoretical RTX 3050 would be slower than the revamped 2060, of course.

If these cards are all inbound as rumored, it’s going to be something of a delicate balancing act regarding where they slot into Nvidia’s relative GPU power scale. Although at this point, however fast these cards are, gamers are likely to happily take whatever they’re given in terms of better stock levels of more wallet-friendly contemporary GPUs.