Forward-looking: With Nvidia's next-gen RTX 4000 series set to arrive this year, will its launch spell the end of the current Ampere consumer line? Possibly not, according to one exec. It appears that the company could continue to produce some RTX 3000 cards alongside Lovelace.

PCMag reports that during a Morgan Stanley investment meeting on Monday, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress hinted at the possibility of both current and next-gen cards being produced and sold alongside each other.

"Even during this period of COVID and supply constraints, it's been interesting because it's given us the opportunity for gaming to continue to sell both the current generation as well as the Turing generation," Kress said. "So we've been doing that to provide more and more supply to our gamers in that. And we may see something like that continue in the future."

As Kress points out, Nvidia kept on making the RTX 2060 after the launch of Ampere, and it released a 12GB version in December that turned out to be expensive, hard to find, and seemingly aimed more at miners than gamers---it certainly didn't do much to address the graphics card shortages.

Back in September 2018, when the first Turing products launched, Kress confirmed that its 10-series Pascal cards would co-exist alongside the new architecture. At the time, many felt this was necessary due to the high selling points of the RTX 2080 Ti/2080/2070; little did we know just how expensive graphics cards would become.

Kress has previously said, on two occasions, that Nvidia expects graphics card supplies to improve in the second half of the year. She repeated the claim again on Monday, claiming a boost to availability would get here starting from the third quarter of 2022. "We will continue to work on supply. I think we'll be in a good supply situation in the second half," she said. Kress added that there will be "some items" related to the next-gen GPUs at Nvidia's GTC event next month.

We're already seeing better availability for graphics cards, along with falling prices, in Europe and on eBay. With the RTX 3090 Ti rumored to land later this month, it seems the GPU crisis is finally starting to alleviate.