Nvidia has ceased production of its GTX 1600 series graphics cards, effectively concluding the GTX era in its gaming graphics card lineup. The company will now exclusively offer GeForce RTX graphics cards for gaming, transitioning away from the GTX models that lacked Tensor cores. The discontinuation includes the GeForce GTX 1650, previously Nvidia's most affordable gaming graphics card option. Industry sources indicate that Nvidia's partner manufacturers will no longer receive shipments of these Turing GPUs, leading to an expected depletion of existing stocks within one to three months.
This shift signifies Nvidia's strategic move towards more advanced RTX graphics cards, which are equipped with ray tracing capabilities and AI-based upsampling (DLSS). The RTX 3050 (6 GB) will serve as the new entry-level desktop model in Nvidia's gaming graphics card segment. For notebooks, the Turing-based RTX 2050 Mobile will remain as the entry-level GPU for the time being. Although the discontinuation of the GTX series may be met with nostalgia among some gamers, particularly those who valued the price-performance ratio of older models, Nvidia's focus on future gaming technologies reflects a broader industry trend towards enhanced graphics performance and innovative features.
The GTX series, which debuted with the GeForce 7800 GTX in mid-2005, has been a staple in the gaming community for nearly 19 years, representing high-performance gaming graphics solutions. The transition to the Turing-based RTX series in 2018 marked a new chapter for Nvidia, emphasizing technologies such as ray tracing and DLSS.
