The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 12GB is here, but does it matter?

After months of rumors and a whole graphics card generation since it first came out, there's a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 on the block, and this time it has 12GB of GDDR6 memory. 

Wccftech has spotted three tweets by manufacturers pointing to new variations of the RTX 2060 with the extended VRAM capacity. 

They're still based on the 192-bit bus, which would necessitate a VRAM budget of either 6GB or 12GB anyway, but it seems like Nvidia has given third party manufacturers permission to release the graphics cards with a bit more memory. 

We've reached out to Nvidia for clarification and will update this story if and when we hear back. 

As for how much this new version of the graphics card will run, that's probably going to be a bit painful. We can't find any retail listings for the new graphics card, but according to a report from PCGamesN, retailers like UK's Scan can't even list the GPU due to insufficient stock. 

We're sure that once listings do go up, the RTX 2060 12GB will be very expensive, but that's probably largely due to the weird state of the graphics card market, where every GPU is priced way more than its worth, due to the ongoing chip shortage. 

Looking at Zotac's 12GB RTX 2060, the rest of the specs are exactly the same, so you can expect the same solid 1080p gaming performance from this graphics card. And if that all sounds good and you just want to get your hands on a GPU, it looks like the GPU is available now - at least as available as graphics cards get in 2021. 

Why does it exist?

While we wait to see whether or not there will actually be an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 hitting the market, we're in dire need of a budget GPU. 

However, as that PCGamesN report states, Nvidia hasn't built the hash rate limiter into the 20-series card like it has with some of its Ampere offerings, which means crypto miners are going to buy it up, defeating the purpose of it being an affordable product.

But even beyond this, the RTX 2060 isn't exactly a graphics card that's built for high-resolution gaming, really showing its strength at 1080p, and not really anything beyond that. 

At that resolution, 6GB of VRAM is still more than enough for most games, so doubling the VRAM probably won't make a huge deal of difference in performance for most people. 

There are specific games out there that will use the extra memory, though. Titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield 2042 are extremely heavy on video memory, and the 12GB buffer will be indispensable for those titles. 

But, again, it's going to largely depend on how much the card is going to retail for. Nvidia hasn't released an MSRP for the card, mostly because it isn't releasing a Founders Edition - which really shouldn't be surprising. 

We haven't heard anything from Nvidia about this card, either, so it's largely seems like a way for the company to sell through its back stock of Turing GPUs. 

And to that, the 12GB VRAM will probably help move some units, it is a bigger number after all, but it probably won't move the needle much, especially since it looks like the new RTX 2060 models have the same TGP, which means performance will be virtually identical. 

Basically if you already have an RTX 2060. This is probably pretty much the same as what you already have.