Rumor mill: What is a company to do when there's a shortage of its latest products? In the case of Nvidia, the answer could be to re-introduce old graphics cards. New rumors claim that team green is set to revive its Turing architecture with the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super re-release.
French site Overclocking.com (via Videocardz) writes that new stock of the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super, released in January 2019 and July 2019, respectively, have already been sent out to board partners and system builders.
At its recent CES keynote, Nvidia said the xx60 series of cards has always been very popular with gamers; the GTX 1060 has long been the number one GPU amongst Steam survey participants, while the RTX 2060 sits in third place.
Some might wonder if re-releasing the cards so close to next month's RTX 3060 launch is a good idea. The reality is that it could all depend on their price. The next Ampere product features 12GB of VRAM and 3,584 CUDA cores for $329. But Nvidia's graph shows the RTX 2060 isn't that far behind its successor when it comes to raster-only gaming, with both cards leaving the GTX 1060 in the dust.
The RTX 2060 launched for $349, which is $20 more than the RTX 3060, while the Super version was $399---the same price as the RTX 3060 Ti. Overclocking.com claims the re-released RTX 2060 will be priced at 300 Euros (around $363), with the Super coming in at 400 Euros ($485). For comparison, the RTX 3060 will retail at 339 Euros in France.
It's hard to imagine an RTX 2060 Super being popular if it costs the same as the RTX 3060 Ti. Hopefully, Nvidia will re-release both Turing cards at competitive prices; the RTX 2060 was already reduced to $299 last year, so knocking another $50 or even $100 off that amount would make it an appealing prospect.
This is still all rumor, but if it is true, gamers looking to upgrade from the GTX 1060, for example, will likely appreciate a newly reduced RTX 2060 or RTX 2060 Super, especially as Ampere remains difficult to find.