According to the latest reports, NVIDIA has discontinued the last batch of GeForce graphics cards equipped with the GTX brand, which means that the GTX era has officially come to an end after 19 years. As NVIDIA's entry-level product, the GTX 16 series graphics cards have always been loved by gamers. Initially, NVIDIA planned to use the GTX 16 series as the lower end of the 2018 lineup, while the top half was driven by the high-end RTX 20 series. Both series are based on a "Turing" graphics architecture, but the GTX 16 series lacks some features like ray tracing and tensor cores compared to the RTX 20 series. The idea was that ray tracing would be very slow at the performance level of the GTX 16 series, so NVIDIA decided to keep Turing's CUDA cores to drive pure rasterized 3D graphics games, allowing gamers to enjoy Turing's higher IPC and 12nm process efficiency improvements compared to the 16nm Pascal while getting great gaming performance.
However, according to Reliable *** Nvidia allocated the last batch of "Turing" architecture GPUs to its AIB vendors for GTX 16 series graphics cards. This means that once these graphics cards run out, gamers looking for value for money will have to look for other options, such as switching to AMD or Intel products. According to the NVIDIA GPU roadmap, the GeForce GTX 16 series will be completely discontinued in the first quarter of 2024. While AIB vendors will continue to assemble and sell GTX 16-series graphics cards until they run out of inventory, according to the leaks, these graphics cards are also expected to disappear from shelves in the next 1-3 months. So, for those who are still considering buying a GTX 16-series graphics card, time is running out.
Currently, the only remaining GeForce GTX 16 series products are the lower-performance GTX 1630 and GTX 1650, while the GTX 1660 series has long been discontinued, including all Super variants. While NVIDIA will continue to provide the latest drivers for these graphics cards and will likely continue to support them for years to come, their performance will be relatively low for quite some time. And once the last GTX 1630 and GTX 1650 graphics cards are sold out, the lowest-cost option for NVIDIA graphics cards will change to the recently launched RTX 3050 6GB. This also means that we're likely to see some low-end GeForce RTX graphics cards, and maybe even the RTX 4050 in the PC desktop world.
The GTX brand first appeared on NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX, initially as a suffix, but became part of the product name in 2008 with the GeForce GTX 280. It became a staple of NVIDIA until the RTX 20 series debuted a decade later, only to re-emerge in 2019 with the budget-oriented GTX 16 series, which lacked additional RTX features like ray tracing and tensor cores. While the GTX 16 series and RTX 20 series use the same Turing architecture, the GTX 16 series has been cut back in silicon, with the largest chip measuring only 284 square millimeters, while the smallest RTX chip is 445 square millimeters. The fastest GTX 1660 Ti has only 24 SM (stream processor), while the slowest RTX 2060 has 30 SM. This also doomed the fate of the GTX brand.
With the introduction of Ampere architecture and RTX 30 series graphics cards, NVIDIA is no longer offering budget-oriented GTX 16 series graphics cards. The cheapest model is the RTX 3050 8GB, which was only recently replaced by the RTX 3050 6GB, and this was only introduced after the release of all RTX 40-series graphics cards. Considering NVIDIA's focus on ray tracing and artificial intelligence, we don't think they will be launching any new GTX graphics cards. If the rumors about the discontinued Turing TU117 chip are true, it will truly mark the end of an era.