It seems that NVIDIA is ready to say goodbye to the GeForce GTX 16 series of video cards, the latest still in production of the American company without ray tracing: the information has emerged in the past few hours from the forums of the Chinese portal Board Channels, and cites official communications to its hardware partners, of which, however, there is no further confirmation at the moment. In any case, the final stop to production/distribution should take place during the first quarter of 2024.
The GeForce GTX 16 series was born in 2019 as a lower-end alternative to the (at the time) newborn RTX 20, through which the first range of GPUs with integrated ray tracing accelerators and hardware AI debuted on the market. In fact, the GTX 16 uses the same Turing architecture, but without the aforementioned coprocessors. Although perhaps less emblazoned than the RTX 20 and subsequent series, the GTX 16 have been very popular in terms of sales, so much so that they have remained among the most popular on Steam for years, particularly with the 1650 (which is still second today, behind only the RTX 3060).
For some reason NVIDIA has kept announcing GTX 16 cards over the years – the last one came out just over a year ago, even though it’s so basic in terms of performance that it’s hard to justify. This made the range one of the longest-running ever in GeForce history. In total, there were only three main models (1650, 1660 and the aforementioned 1630), but many variants and derivations came out – Ti, SUPER, laptop, Max-Q laptop, and even variants with different memory technologies (GDDR5 or GDDR6) for a total of almost 20 cards.
The baton for the sub-$200 segment will then pass to an RTX – albeit an older generation. According to rumors, NVIDIA is in fact preparing a variant of the entry-level 3050 with 6 GB of VRAM instead of the usual 8.
