Nvidia halts GeForce GTX manufacturing, signaling the brand's end

In context: Nvidia adopted the GTX brand in 2004 with the GeForce 7 series and the high-end GeForce 7800 GTX gaming card. The GTX suffix evolved into a formal branding effort with the release of the GeForce GTX 280 in 2008. In recent years, it has been used for Nvidia's more budget-friendly GPUs, often sold alongside the more powerful RTX cards.

Unnamed sources quoted on the Board Channels forums claim Nvidia has quietly discontinued the GTX 16 series of affordable gaming GPUs. The last remaining chips based on the Turing architecture have reportedly been allocated to OEM manufacturers, and Nvidia's foundries have now ceased GTX chip manufacturing altogether.

The sources suggest that the current inventory of GTX 16 GPUs is expected to sell out in the next three months. After that, neither Nvidia nor custom GPU manufacturers will be able to supply additional GTX cards to channel partners. Nvidia had already discontinued the GTX 1660 series, and the remaining GTX models available on the market include the very low-power GTX 1630 and GTX 1650 cards.

The GTX brand was initially replaced in 2018 with the release of the GeForce 20 "RTX" series. Nvidia repurposed the brand in 2019 with the GeForce GTX 16 series, utilizing the same Turing architecture as the GeForce 20 RTX cards but without the most advanced architectural features, such as Tensor and RT (ray tracing) specialized computing cores.

After the recent surge in popularity experienced by AI algorithms in the past few years, Nvidia has no plans to continue producing budget-oriented GPUs. Following the introduction of the Ampere generation in 2020 (GeForce RTX 30), the company has not presented any Ampere-based replacement for the GTX 16 series.

Once the remaining GTX 1630 and GTX 1650 cards are depleted, the company will cater to the market's lowest-performing segments with the RTX 3050 on desktops and the RTX 2050 on mobile systems.

Nvidia is expected to continue providing extended support for GTX 16 cards for a few more years, addressing security bugs and releasing updated drivers for increasingly aging PCs. However, if the latest rumors prove true, the last budget GTX GPUs may become difficult to find in a very short time frame.