The production stop means that the GTX 1660, GTX 1650 and GTX 1630 series stop becoming available. The GTX 1600 series is cheaper, hence more affordable.
More than 4 years ago, Nvidia released the GTX 1600 graphics cards. Officially known as GeForce 16 series, the architecture used inside the GPU isn’t much different from the RTX 2000.
However, the GTX 1600 graphics cards lack something which is more in the news these days. It lacked hardware support for ray tracing and DLSS upscaling.
Due to this, the GTX 1600 series graphics were cheaper and became more affordable for budget gamers. In fact, so famous is the GTX 1600 that as per Steam Hardware Survey, the GTX 1650 remains the second most used graphics card out there even now.
The whole GTX series line-up includes:
- GeForce GTX 1630
- GeForce GTX 1650
- GeForce GTX 1650 Super
- GeForce GTX 1660
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Nvidia has discontinued the GTX 1660 series long ago. Now it seems that now Nvidia wants to stop the production of the GTX 1650 and GTX 1630 series too.
GTX 1600 To Be Discontinued
ITHome (via @harukaze5719) and VideoCardz reports that starting the first quarter of next year, that is, Q1 2024, Nvidia will stop the production of the GeForce GTX 1600 series.
This means that Nvidia will stop supplying the GTX 1600 series GPUs to the graphics cards brands and makers.
If that is not enough, the rumor states that there will be no cheap graphics card available to fill this price gap.
For the record, the cheapest graphics card available in the RTX 3000 series is the RTX 3050 and Nvidia wants to stop producing the 8GB version of it and replace it with a 6GB version instead.
Just a quick search reveals that while the GTX 1650 sells for around $170-$180, the RTX 3050 is available for $220-$260. This means there’s a lot of room in the sub-$200 graphics cards, which Nvidia seems to be discontinuing.
Yes, likes of AMD is going to release Ryzen 8000 series with a powerful built-in GPU, especially in the G version of processors. However, all this means cheap dedicated graphics cards will not be as commonly available as they have been before. Especially for the budget users.
