NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB Review 2022 – We have with us the “new” NVIDIA GeForce RTX-2060 12 GB. This is for all intents and purposes of a new GPU model released by the green team just a few weeks ago, at the start of December in 2021.
The GeForce RTX-2060 12 GB is based on the 12nm Turing graphics architecture that already debuted way back in 2018. This is not just a memory capacity bump for the RTX-2060 that originally shipped with 6GB, but also a cross between the original RTX-2060 and newer RTX-2060 SUPER, in that it has the GPU-core configuration of the latter, but with the memory bus width of the former.
The RTX-2060 12 GB is based on the same 12nm TU106 silicon as the original. This GPU chip physically has 2,304CUDA cores and a 256bit wide G-DDR6 memory bus, which are maxed out on the RTX-2070. The original RTX-2060 was carved out by enabling just 1,920CUDA cores and reducing the memory bus width to 192bit.
Faced with competition from AMD’s RX-5700, NVIDIA refreshed its product-stack with the RTX-2060 SUPER, which had 2,176CUDA cores and a 256bit wide memory bus. The new RTX-2060 12 GB in this review has 2,176CUDA cores, which is the same as the RTX-2060 SUPER, but with a 192bit wide memory bus that now holds double the memory amount, at 12GB.
Having the same CUDA core count as the RTX-2060 SUPER means the RTX-2060 12GB has more RT cores(34 vs. 30) and Tensor cores (272 vs. 240) than the original RTX-2060. Interestingly, the card’s typical board power is higher at 185W, as opposed to 175W with the RTX-2060 SUPER.
This probably has to do with the double density memory chips, or NVIDIA simply giving it more boosting headroom. The maximum boost frequency is set at 1650MHz, which is the same as the RTX-2060 SUPER.
Why NVIDIA had to resort to this move is an anyone’s guess. AMD’s Radeon RX-6600 XT and RX-6600 offer nice levels of performance compared to the current-gen RTX-3060 Ampere, and at least on the desktop segment NVIDIA did not further cut down its 8nm GA-106 silicon.
The company probably had some 12nm inventory to go around, and 16Gbit 14Gbps GDDR6 memory chips are probably priced similarly to what 8Gbit chips cost back in 2018. The PCB complexity is kept to a minimum with just 6 memory chips across the 192bit bus, while enabling a handful more CUDA-cores costs practically nothing for NVIDIA.
Hopefully this article NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB Review 2022 can be benefit and useful.