Once existing stocks of GTX 16 series cards are sold, it's game over.
Nvidia has stopped producing GPUs based on its Turing architecture. The last of them included the likes of the GTX 1660, 1650 and 1630 series of GPUs. Once remaining stocks sell, they’ll be gone and with them the “GTX” brand itself, leaving all Nvidia gaming graphics cards as “RTX” models. Well, with one possible exception, more on which in a moment.
The GTX brand was first used in 2008 as a suffix on the Geforce 9800 GTX. It then morphed into a prefix for selected high-end GPUs with the Geforce 200 series in 2008, such as the Geforce GTX 280.
Over the next few generations, the GTX prefix expanded to cover most of the range. But even right up to and including the GeForce 10 series of 2016, not all models got the “GTX” moniker, with the Geforce GT 1010 and Geforce GT 1030 not being deemed worthy of the final “X”.
With the arrival of the RTX 20-series in late 2018, the writing was on the wall for GTX as Nvidia began investing heavily in all things ray-traced. But the GTX brand and pure raster GPUs got a stay of execution in the GTX 16-series, topping out with the GTX 1660 Ti that launched in 2019 as a more value-orientated mainstream line of GPUs.
At the time, they provided a welcome low-cost alternative to Nvidia’s pricey RTX 20-series cards, which arguably disappointed when it came to pure raster performance in the name of bringing new hardware ray-tracing acceleration to market for the first time.
(Image credit: Future)
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They’ve been in production and on sale even since. But according to Videocardz, manufacturing of the GTX 16 line has now ceased and once existing stocks of the cards are sold, that’ll be it for them and the GTX brand.
In a slightly odd twist of fate, it’s possible that the “GT” brand will live on past the demise of GTX. Currently, some Geforce GT 1030 cards remain on sale and it’s unclear if they will be EOL’ed along with the GTX 16 boards.
Whatever, while this information does not come officially from Nvidia itself, it does seem likely that GTX is dead. Long live RTX, and whatever comes after it. NTX for neural graphics processing, anyone?
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