NVIDIA has decided to end the life cycle of GeForce RTX 16 graphics adapters. According to Chinese sources, developers are no longer accepting orders for GPUs for the respective video cards. According to estimates, the available stocks of chips at partners will last for another 1-3 months, and new deliveries are no longer expected.

As a reminder, GeForce GTX 16xx series models were introduced in the spring of 2019, almost simultaneously with the first GeForce RTX 20 line of graphics cards. GTX GPUs also used the Turing architecture and were manufactured on 12 nm technology, but unlike RTX chips, they did not have hardware units for ray tracing and tensor cores. At the time, these were compromise affordable options for those who were not ready to finance the development of the RT ecosystem from their own pockets.

GeForce GTX 16xx graphics cards are still available for sale. While the selection of the older GeForce GTX 1660/1660 SUPER/1660 Ti models is already quite limited, the younger GeForce GTX 1650 4GB is still offered in considerable quantities. The retail price of ~$160-180 creates demand for solutions of this class. Obviously, with the advent of GeForce RTX 3050 6GB, which has a starting retail price tag of ~$210, the emphasis will gradually shift towards new solutions even in this category of graphics cards. The official EOL (End-of-Life) status for GeForce GTX will only accelerate this process.