i just heard NVIDIA's got a sick new GPU
for us to play with
well what part of that is wrong did we not get it or is there no new GPU
yes wait oh this is the rtx 2060 relaunch isn't
it yep but
but why think if i know you want to talk about
it yes yes i do
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NVIDIA's new old stock GPU uses the same core layout as the rtx 2060 super but
instead of that GPU's eight Gigabyte memory configuration they're bumping it
up to 12 gigabytes of gddr6 at first glance that might sound like a
decent upgrade but there's more to the story than just the size of the frame
buffer alone the available memory bandwidth is still being stifled by the
original rtx 2060's 192-bit bus so in
that respect it's actually a step back from the rtx 2060 super that means this
card should perform somewhere between the og 2060 and the super variant rather
than surpassing them unless you have a specific need for the extra video memory
and you just might to account for newer titles coming out with bigger and more
varied assets NVIDIA would have seen fit to give the rtx 2060 some extra juice in
the caboose not to mention the marketing benefits 12 gigs puts them on par with
AMD who has for some time been criticizing NVIDIA's lower end cards for
their smaller frame buffers if nothing else at least it helps to
ensure that anyone who's buying one of these rtx 2060s isn't stuck with all of
the limitations of a three-year-old design
obviously you're not going to be cranking the visuals on these cards but
you're also not going to be scrambling to upgrade again in a year or so
maybe we'd love to verify that but we certainly can't today
not only has NVIDIA canned the founders edition that they briefly listed on
their website but we didn't get a card to review and they
haven't been talking to the press either us included as far as we could tell this card was
still a maybe on the horizon
rumor as recently as last week there's
two ways you could look at this first obviously we already know pretty
much how the rtx 2060 performs so reviews aren't likely to reveal anything
mind-blowing maybe they felt it wasn't worth bothering
the second is more troubling
as of writing i have no idea how much it costs
each board partner is going to have their own skus with their own pricing
and NVIDIA hasn't announced a baseline msrp like they usually would instead
opting for the cryptic it's a premium product so it'll be
priced accordingly line it could be that this card will be
very expensive and they're trying to get out in front of a negative news cycle
full of inevitable comparisons to the 30 series launch msrps and to be fair to
NVIDIA there's no real benefit to tech press and subsequently consumers yelling
at them about how their msrp doesn't exist when it's inevitably higher for
most partner boards now we've talked at length about why msrps have been rising
and why the msrps that many gpus originally launched at are functionally
extinct but the tldr is that it's a combination of the ongoing chip shortage
raw materials skyrocketing in price thanks to coveted recovery and
speculation and just plain and simple supply and demand
it's becoming more expensive just to get the chips let alone put it all together
and this cost isn't going away anytime soon
NVIDIA sells gpus to everyone else so that they can eat that cost then but
partners don't have the luxury of selling loss leaders oh this is
interesting i just got a response from ASUS apparently they don't know what the
msrp is yet i'd love to say that's surprising but i just don't think it is
that NVIDIA won't commit to an msrp could be seen as a small mercy
or another way of messing with their partners whatever the case partners
won't have to do much to both piss everyone off and sell all their stock at
once the fact of the matter is that both the rtx 2060s launched at 349 and the rtx
3060 that's supposed to replaced it launched at 3.29
if the price ends up being anything higher than that our slash hardware is
going to lose their minds whether it's justified or not
it feels like NVIDIA is hanging partners out to dry again while
they continue to enjoy the positive perception of reasonable msrp on their
cards that board partners have no hope of matching with this release or any
other either in terms of price or performance
we'll have them link down below once they're available but i'm not hopeful
it'll be a good deal though as unpopular as this take might be it'll still be a
bargain at least at off-the-shelf prices compared to scalper rtx 2060 prices on
ebay i mean look at this they are regularly selling for more than 500 to
600 depending on whether it's the super variant of the card and whoever bought
this one for over 800 us dollars must
have been pretty desperate the people buying these scalped
secondary market cards are the people who will benefit the most they've
clearly already accepted that they're going to have to shell out flagship
money for a less than flagship experience and more cards on the market
means that there's less pressure for these second-hand gpus
i mean it's really a win-win for consumers as far as i'm concerned just
like our new swag kit on lttstore.com it's heavier than a sweater and lighter
than a jacket everyone wins except
not really if NVIDIA has been holding on to these
gpus because they couldn't sell them before now then this is more of a
positive for them than for anyone else and it means that these gpus have a
finite quantity but i don't think that's true NVIDIA would have sold remaining
stock for cheap or to a system integrator for pre-built or what have
you before now remember the 7900 gto
those were basically 7 900 gtx chips that were perfectly fine but deprecated
by the outstanding 8800 series besides
there's no way that they'd have enough surplus to launch a whole new sku at
this point across their entire range of partners 7900 gto as you might recall
was MSI and evga exclusively due to its
limited quantities now turing rtx 20 series was produced on
tsmc's 12 nanometer node and more likely
what's happening is NVIDIA is utilizing otherwise idle production because you
got to remember guys even though tsmc offers seven nanometer and five
nanometer for cutting edge products and is working on ramping three nanometer
they haven't necessarily just taken their last gen old equipment and hucked
it in a bin due to the large upfront investment that
kind of stuff ends up getting phased out very gradually i mean even AMD's
flagship x570 chipset is still using 14
nanometer because it's economical so if no other gpus are being produced
on 12 nanometer right now any new capacity that NVIDIA gets out of
those fabs is new capacity as far as the
GPU market is concerned and i think they made the right call going with the rtx
2060 super cores as well because assuming that they're going to be using
the relatively small tu-106 die they
should be able to get more good dies per wafer than they would with something
like a 2070 super redux or something
along those lines okay this is starting to make sense
except for the fact that NVIDIA is bundling these gpus with 12 gigabytes of
gddr6 gdgara 6 was a large part of the production bottleneck that played both
NVIDIA and AMD through the 2020 and 2021
phases of this shortage and i haven't found any evidence to
suggest that things are so much better now that a relief skew like this can
reliably use so much memory 12 gigs at 192 bit means that we're looking at six
16 gigabit dies the exact same layout of
the rtx 3060 well this might have been done so partners could use the same or
similar pcbs it means that this memory is not going into rtx 3060 production or
rtx 3050 production which is expected sometime in early 2022 get subscribed so
you don't miss our coverage of that card when it launches
i can only assume that they have their reasons clearly NVIDIA knows more about
supply chain management than we do at this point or indeed than they did when
they launched the 8800 series all those years ago it did seem that around summer
of this year demand for gddr6 had fallen
in comparison with supply so who knows and on the subject of lessons
learned it does say a lot about the mature way that NVIDIA is handling this
by straight up calling this card what it is 20 60 12 gig remember how NVIDIA
rebranded fermi and then later kepler into two generations each i mean we got
new gpus with new names but they were
the same bloody thing it's stupid that they have to get a gold
star for calling a spade a spade in this industry but
here we are and as long as the logistics do work out this is going to be a net
benefit to the overall availability of graphics cards for
at least a little while which is good for everyone just as long as we don't go
back much further than this i had a dream the other night that NVIDIA
re-released the gtx 780 and everyone was happy about it i mean 28 nanometer is an
even less utilized node these days right so
i don't think that dream's coming true anytime soon re-releasing an older GPU
is only remotely feasible because we are in such
desperate circumstances and because the process node for that GPU is still in
production and maybe not fully tapped by other industries it
certainly carries with it some challenges like the fact that NVIDIA
might have to continue to support 20 series cards for much longer than they
might have originally planned in order to maintain their reputation for
industry-leading long-term driver support this move then requires some
lateral thinking on the part of both NVIDIA and prospective buyers
hey it's not going to be for everyone but we live in interesting times and the
market is clearly there for this class of GPU i just hope that the power
consumption per hash rate is not appealing enough to make it appealing
because i doubt they respun it for a light hash rate version
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right that you should have built a pc back in 2019 but for all the wrong
reasons yep we all lost the game but
there's more info about the shortage and prices in there that might help to make
some sense of these troubled times