NVIDIA plans to phase out its entire GeForce GTX 16 series GPU lineup by the first quarter of 2024 and has notified its Add-In Board (AIB) partners. The GeForce GTX 16 series represents the final remnants of the pre-RTX era, characterized by the “GTX” branding for all GPUs. It has been over a year since the last release within this series, namely the low-end design, GeForce GTX 1630. However, as of Q1 2024, the GeForce GTX 16 series is anticipated to be discontinued, signaling the end of production for these GPUs.
Information originating from the Chinese Board Channel Forums indicates that NVIDIA has declared its intentions to cease the production of its final GeForce GTX family. The GeForce GTX 16 GPU family encompasses a variety of graphics cards, including the GTX 1660 SUPER, GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1650 Ti, GTX 1650 SUPER, and the GTX 1630. Renowned for their popularity in the mainstream and low-end market segments, these graphics cards are sought after due to their affordability and ability to deliver satisfactory gaming performance, particularly in eSports titles and older games.
Nevertheless, these GPUs lack numerous features that have become essential in the NVIDIA GeForce ecosystem, including Ray Tracing, DLSS, AV1, and more. Despite sharing the same Turing GPU architecture as the initial RTX family, the RTX 20 series, the feature support for these entry-level cards has been curtailed due to performance-per-dollar constraints. While it is possible to enable ray tracing on these cards, the absence of RT cores results in suboptimal performance.
Source: Board Channels