Rumors are circulating that the Nvidia GTX 16-series has finally been discontinued. According to Board Channels sources cited by VideoCardz, Nvidia's last remaining Turing architecture GPUs for GTX 16-series graphics cards have been allocated to its AIBs. Once these run out, budget gamers will have to look elsewhere — we'd suggest AMD or Intel, as they have the least expensive of the best graphics cards. This would also mark the end of the GTX era after a 19-year run, should these rumors prove true.
A machine translation of the Board Channels post says that an Nvidia GPU roadmap seen by a forum member shows that the GeForce GTX 16-series is "completely discontinued in the first quarter of 2024." AIBs will continue to assemble and sell GTX 16-series cards while inventories last, which could take some time, but according to the source the last of the GTX cards will disappear from shelves "within the next 1–3 months."
At present, the only remaining GeForce GTX 16-series products are the anemic GTX 1630 and slightly less anemic GTX 1650. The GTX 1660 family has long since been retired, along with any Super variants. Nvidia continues to support these GPUs with its latest drivers and will likely do so for at least a few more years, but the performance has been quite lacking for some time.
Once the last GTX 1630 and GTX 1650 cards are gone, the lowest cost choice for Nvidia GPUs becomes the recently introduced RTX 3050 6GB. Perhaps the timing of the arrival of the lower-spec RTX 3050 and this purported roadmap decision are somehow related. It might also mean that we will see some lower-tier GeForce RTX cards, or the RTX 4050 might come to the world of PC desktops.
