NVIDIA is said to be planning to axe two of its best-selling GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080. This move comes as a surprise as the company has been making strong profits lately. The reason for the axe may be that NVIDIA is struggling to keep up with competition in the graphics card market. The company has been losing market share to AMD and Nvidia’s main rival, Qualcomm, has been investing heavily in new technology such as ray tracing and deep learning. This move could have a significant impact on NVIDIA’s bottom line as it could lead to a decline in sales and profits.
Industry reports claim NVIDIA has killed off the budget GTX 1660 graphics card, as well as the formerly mid-range RTX 2060. Both cards were solid options for budget gamers who were looking to play games in 1080p at a budget — the RTX 2060, in particular, is the second most popular graphics card on Steam’s Hardware Survey, only behind the older GTX 1060. All models of the RTX 2060 are seemingly being discontinued, including the regular 2060, the 2060 Super, and the 2060 with 12GB of VRAM that was launched in 2020.
Both cards are fairly old, but NVIDIA relied on their production to have some graphics cards for gamers on store shelves at the height of the crypto craze GPU shortage. After all, NVIDIA couldn’t keep up with the demand for RTX 3000 cards, so many gamers were just resorting to buying older cards and calling it a day.
If you’re looking to buy a budget GPU, the RTX 3050 and the RTX 3060 are still worthwhile choices, and stock is still available at some retailers. The death of these two cards is certainly a bummer, though, and they will be sorely missed.
Source: ExtremeTech
