NVIDIA officially confirms GeForce RTX 2060 12GB through… a new graphics driver

NVIDIA releases 497.09 drivers with RTX 2060 12GB support

The GPU maker confirms the new GeForce SKU in the most unexpected way.

With the release of the new Game Ready driver, NVIDIA officially confirmed it is launching a new SKU, the RTX 2060 12GB. It is therefore not called RTX 2065 or 2060 Super 12GB as some have thought, but exactly how it appeared in the leaks, simply RTX 2060 12GB.

Interestingly, the fact that NVIDIA is launching such an SKU is not even mentioned in the official blog post for the new driver. Instead, the SKU shows up in the release notes, which are always published alongside the new driver.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB is to feature TU106 GPU with 2176 CUDA cores. This model will only not be equipped with more CUDA cores but also twice as much memory as the original RTX 2060 with a 6GB buffer. The specifications are therefore nearly identical to RTX 2060 SUPER, however, the bandwidth will be limited by a 192-bit memory bus.

The appearance of the card in the drivers seemingly confirms that it launches next week. The previously mentioned date is December 7th.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX x60 Series
VideoCardz.com	GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER	GeForce RTX 2060 12GB	GeForce RTX 2060 6GB	GeForce RTX 3060 Ti	GeForce RTX 3060
Picture
Architecture	NVIDIA Turing	NVIDIA Turing	NVIDIA Turing	NVIDIA Ampere	NVIDIA Ampere
Board	PG150	PG161	PG160	PG190/PG142	PG190
GPU	12nm TU106-410	12nm TU106	12nm TU106-200	8nm GA104-200	8nm GA106-300
Boost Clock	1650 MHz	1650 MHz	1680 MHz	1665 MHz	1777 MHz
CUDA : RT : Tensor	2176 : 64 : 136	2176 : 64 : 136	1920 : 48 : 120	4864 : 38 : 152	3584 : 28 : 112
Memory	8GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6
Memory Clock	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15 Gbps
Memory Bus	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/s	336 GB/s	336 GB/s	448 GB/s	360 GB/s
TGP/TBP	175W	184W	160W	200W	170W
MSRP	399 USD	TBC	349 -> 299 USD	399 USD	329 USD
Release Date	July 9th, 2019	December 7th, 2021	January 14, 2019	December 2nd, 2020	Late February 2021

Source: NVIDIA (PDF)