If a recent Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) submission (spotted by PCGamesN (opens in new tab)) is to be trusted, the GeForce RTX 2060 (opens in new tab) could be going under the knife very soon.
The GeForce RTX 2060 originally came with the TU106 silicon, featuring 1,920 CUDA cores and 6GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps. EVGA would later surgically switch (opens in new tab) the TU106 silicon for the larger TU104 silicon in its GeForce RTX 2060 KO Gaming (opens in new tab) graphics card. EVGA's swap out was insignificant as the same specifications transferred over to the new variant. This time around, however, the GeForce RTX 2060 could potentially get a real upgrade.
Asus' EEC filing, which was submitted yesterday, mentions three variants of the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory instead of the default 6GB configuration.
There are a few possible theories before we rush to conclusions. For one, this whole thing could be a human error. Asus uses a pretty similar naming scheme for its graphics card, so it's easy to get mixed up.
For example, the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 is identified as ROG-STRIX-RTX2060-6G-GAMING while ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 Super is designated as ROG-STRIX-RTX2060S-8G-GAMING.
It's possible that the Asus employee mistyped the part numbers when submitting the entry. Perhaps, the employee wanted to register the GeForce RTX 2060 Super (opens in new tab) but forgot to add the "S" to the part number. Then again, why register them now when the GeForce RTX 2060 Super have been out since last year?
Another possibility is that Asus is just registering the part numbers in case Nvidia does decide to refresh the GeForce RTX 2060 with more memory in the future. Remember, you can submit as many products as you want to the EEC, and not every one of them will be produced or released to the market.
| Model | Part Number | |
|---|---|---|
| ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 EVO OC Edition | ROG-STRIX-RTX2060-O8G-EVO-GAMING | |
| ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 EVO Advanced Edition | ROG-STRIX-RTX2060-A8G-EVO-GAMING | |
| ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 | ROG-STRIX-RTX2060-8G-EVO-GAMING |
If Nvidia does upgrade the GeForce RTX 2060, it would put the graphics card on par with the GeForce RTX 2060 Super in terms of memory. The Super variant wouldn't be affected performance-wise though as it still holds a higher CUDA core count (2,176 as opposed to the GeForce RTX 2060's 1,920).
In terms of performance ranking (opens in new tab), the GeForce RTX 2060 falls behind AMD's Navi-powered Radeon RX 5700 (opens in new tab) and Radeon RX 5600 XT (opens in new tab). Our tests show that the Radeon RX 5700 on average delivers up to 11% higher frame rates in comparison to the GeForce RTX 2060. Would the GeForce RTX 2060 be able to close this gap with 2GB of additional GDDR6 memory? Probably not.
Nonetheless, having 8GB of memory would make the GeForce RTX 2060 look good beside the Radeon RX 5600 XT, which only has 6GB of GDDR6 memory. The Radeon RX 5600 XT has a slight edge on the GeForce RTX 2060 in regards to performance. The extra memory could result very useful in high resolution gaming and might help push the GeForce RTX 2060 ahead, even if it's just by a hair.
