At a Q&A with the company in Las Vegas for CES 2026, Tom's Hardware put the question to CEO Jensen Huang regarding ways Nvidia could ease pressure on the consumer gaming GPU market.
Nvidia took to the stage at CES in Las Vegas this week, but new consumer GPU hardware was conspicuously absent as CEO Jensen Huang instead touted the latest and greatest the company has to offer in the realm of heavyweight AI computing. With DDR5 prices skyrocketing, SSDs not far behind, and Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 now fetching an eye-watering $4,000 at some retailers, bad news is everywhere for PC builders.
GPU pricing is facing a squeeze from both ends, with both increasing RAM costs and likely dwindling supply causing a price increase on Nvidia's top GPUs. There are, of course, ways to address this, one notable option being boosting production of older GPUs that rely on older process nodes, less DRAM, and older technologies.
Sketchy rumors have been floating around about the return of the Ampere-based RTX 3060 in 2026. Most notably, AMD has teased the return of some Zen 3 AM4 chips to ease the strain on PC gamers looking for upgrades, revealing that spinning up old tech isn't beyond the realms of possibility. So we straight up asked Nvidia.
"Hi Jensen, Paul Alcorn from Tom's Hardware. The prices of gaming GPUs, especially the latest and greatest, are really becoming high, which might be due to some restrictions on supply and production capacity, one would assume. Do you think that maybe spinning up production on some of the older generation GPUs, on older process nodes where there might be more available production capacity, would help that, or maybe also increasing the supply of GPUs with lower amounts of DRAM? Are there steps that could be taken, or any specific color you could give us on that?
Huang: "Yeah, possibly, and we could possibly, depending on which generation, we could also bring the latest generation AI technology to the previous generation GPUs, and that will require a fair amount of engineering, but it's also within the realm of possibility. I'll go back and take a look at this. It's a good idea."
Huang's non-committal answer doesn't shed much light on the company's plans, but bringing back older GPUs is clearly not off the table, even if the answer suggests it's not something the company has previously considered. This may signal that Nvidia doesn't think the issue is getting out of control just yet. Supply will inevitably improve as time passes and chipmakers dramatically increase production on the latest process nodes, but we are likely years away from GPU supply reaching a healthy enough balance to feed both the consumer and AI data center markets. In the meantime, an increase in the number of GPUs built on older architectures and process nodes might be our only hope for affordable gaming GPUs.
On the software side, the possibility of newer AI-driven features that will boost performance to those older GPUs would also be a boon not only for those with existing gear but also for those who would be forced to grudgingly buy discrete older-gen GPUs as the only affordable option. And while lower VRAM capacities absolutely have an impact on gaming performance, newer AI-driven features like DLSS do help offset that enough to make them at least serviceable.
There remain trade-offs; Nvidia's latest DLSS 4.5 model cuts performance on older GPUs significantly, so as Jensen says, Nvidia would have to do an awful lot of work behind the scenes to make that prospect a reality. Ultimately, that could be helpful, at least until some unknown point in the future where a GPU with plenty of VRAM doesn't cost as much as a used car.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
