NVIDIA is reportedly ceasing manufacture of the GTX 1660/RTX 2060 line, according to ITHome. For those who don’t know, the GTX 1660 / RTX 2060 series dominated the market when it initially appeared. This rash choice could portend a prospective Ada architecture-based replacement to this lineup.
According to ITHome’s sources, NVIDIA has decided to cease making 4 GPUs, namely;
- GTX 1660
- GTX 1660 Super
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 Super
Similar to how the majority of these GPUs have already been sold out, the only models still in stock are the GTX 1650 and GTX 1630. The price of Ampere will benefit from this shift in strategy. It is currently anticipated that the notoriously expensive RTX 3050 will be priced down to fill the void. AMD’s RX 6600 is presently available for as little as $229, making it around $50 less expensive than the RTX 3050 while still providing 30% more performance.
The GTX 1660 Super was a fairly strong budget GPU, thus this is unfortunate news for the majority of gamers on a tighter budget. Fans of NVIDIA will have to wait a little while, but don’t worry RDNA2 AMD’s GPUs are still available. It should be noted that while being based on the Turing architecture, the GTX 1660 series lacked RT and DLSS capabilities. Similar to that, we don’t know anything about the GTX 1650 Super and the GTX 1660 Ti.
Overall, it’s time to bid our beloved GTX 1660 / RTX 2060 lineup farewell. In order to address the GPU scarcity, the RTX 2060 was re-released. The RTX 2060 came in a 12GB version, although it wasn’t much more memory than the 6GB model. The outcomes are questionable in terms of whether this choice improved the state of the market.
In October of last year, the GTX 1660 Super was introduced as a 2K (1440p) gaming card. This GPU was a mid-range beast, pushing practically all games at 1440p at more than 60FPS. Of course, this GPU was slowed down over time, but the truth remains. Since then, the only “relatively” new GPU that is still slightly slower than the GTX 1660 Ti is the RTX 3050.
Ada Lovelace may provide a new weapon to NVIDIA’s budget armoury, but the company’s current pricing policy suggests otherwise. Ada is a pricey architecture, and judging on how the RTX 4050 Mobile first seems, the AD107 GPU does not appear to provide a significant performance boost.