The Nvidia RTX 2060 might be arriving sooner than we thought. Despite Nvidia admitting it has an overstock of mid-range GPUs in the channel leftover from the crypto-craze, the green team might be prepping the RTX 2060 for launch in the week following CES 2019.
Word of a potential launch date sometime around the second week of January comes from Andreas Schilling, editor over at Hardwareluxx, on Twitter. Schilling confirms that marketing materials for the RTX 2060 have already started to propagate out to marketing departments at various manufacturers, and that the cards will come equipped with 6GB of GDDR6.
Unfortunately that is just about all the confirmation we get on tech specs for the upcoming card. A previous leak suggests the pared down TU106 GPU within the RTX 2060 will feature 1,920 CUDA Cores within 30 SMs. Since Tensor and RT Cores, those capable of AI inference and real-time ray tracing, are inherently tied to each SM, that would suggest a total of 240 Tensor Cores and 30 RT Cores within the upcoming card.
And that could be just enough to scrape by in real-time ray tracing. Nvidia has outlined a minimum of five Giga Rays per second to generate enough compute power to get by in the “holy grail” of graphics tech, and the RTX 2060, by our preliminary maths, would just about manage that minimum with that speculative loadout.
#GeForceRTX2060 for desktop is real! (For those who still had doubts) Marketing material for the smallest #Turing expansion is arriving at the manufacturers marketing divisions. Beside 6 GB of #GDDR6 I can not confirm any tech specs. Stay tuned for the second week of January! pic.twitter.com/xaorlA6JLd
— Andreas Schilling (@aschilling) December 16, 2018
It has been heavily rumoured that Nvidia will be launching mobile and Max-Q GPUs at CES 2019, with mobile variants of the RTX 2080, RTX 2070, and RTX 2060 on the docket.
Yet again it looks like Nvidia is opting for the RTX branding, too. While ray tracing is the signature feature of its RTX platform, it’s not the only functionality worthy of the prefix. There’s also DLSS, variable rate shading, and more inherent to the Turing architecture that potentially warrants the RTX branding further down the GPU stack.
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But if this leak rings true, we can expect Nvidia to be gearing up for the launch of its ‘mid-range’ graphics card shortly after. Pardon my apprehension, but all that extra silicon in a whopping great big die doesn’t usually make for a cheap graphics card, and it will be some feat if Nvidia have managed to trim enough of the fat from the TU106 to match the GTX 1060’s price tag.