And so it begins. Nvidia’s RTX 2060 has leaked, starting with Gigabyte’s factory overclocked TU106 mainstream graphics card. According to a report supposedly direct from the source, the RTX 2060 is expected to launch early next year with 6GB of GDDR6 memory and potentially enough ray tracing silicon to just about scrape by.
The RTX 2060 – not GTX as often speculated – will be built on the same GPU as the RTX 2070: the TU106. Within that GPU will be 30 active SMs, as per the report. While the RTX 2070 features a full complement of 2,304 CUDA Cores, the RTX 2060 is reportedly fitted with only 1,920.
But that 30 SM count could also mean more than just pure compute power. If Nvidia sticks to the the book with the Turing architecture, we would also see an RT Core for every SM in the RTX 2060’s TU106 GPU. Potentially, that’s a total of 30 within the proposed mainstream card. A little maths tells us that 17% decrease in RT Cores would still be sufficient for roughly five Giga Rays per second of ray tracing performance. Or rather, just enough to scrape into the lower limits of worthwhile performance.
That GPU wouldn’t be particularly small as a result, however. All those extra RT and Tensor cores make for seriously sizable GPUs within the current Turing lineup. If the RTX 2060 follows suit with a GPU of 445mm2 – the same size as that in the RTX 2070 – that’s roughly 123% larger than the Pascal GP106 GPU from the GTX 1060.
| RTX 2060* | RTX 2070 | GTX 1060 | |
| GPU | TU106 | TU106 | GP106 |
| Die size | 445mm2 | 445mm2 | 200mm2 |
| CUDA Cores | 1,920 | 2,304 | 1,280 |
| RT Cores | 30 | 36 | N/A |
| Tensor Cores | 240 | 288 | N/A |
| Price | – | $499 (MSRP) | $249 (MSRP) |
*Leaked specs
And if we could speculate on cost for just a moment – sodium pending – that doesn’t sound like all that cheap of a graphics card. With the RTX 2070 coming in at $499 MSRP for the reference model, can Nvidia really price the RTX 2060 much cheaper than $399?
While the high-end Turing cards were announced back in August, the mainstream graphics card segment has still been stuck on last-gen Pascal product. Nvidia hasn’t made any official mention of mainstream Turing cards as of yet, only saying if it were to make any mainstream GPUs anytime soon, they would likely be built on the Turing architecture.
But it wasn’t looking likely that this launch would happen anytime soon. Due to GPU stock leftover from the cryptocurrency crunch, Nvidia is reportedly hesitant to ship any new product into the channel for another quarter at least. With news of an oversupply hitting Nvidia stock hard, the mainstream Turing cards looked distant at best.
A face off between AMD’s Navi and Nvidia’s mainstream Turing cards was looking set for the end of Q2.
But this leak from over at Videocardz has the RTX 2060 set for an early 2019 launch nevertheless. Nvidia has been rumoured to be launching its mobile and Max-Q GPU lineup at CES next month, including the mobile version of the RTX 2060, so maybe we’ll hear more on its desktop sibling in Las Vegas.