Nvidia has reportedly halted production of its current-generation Turing GeForce graphics cards, which suggests the launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 and its fellow Ampere GPUs could be incoming.
According to Chinese website ithome and WCCFTech, the majority of high-end GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards are being discontinued and major vendors will soon be delisting them. All this points towards preparations for the GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards launch, likely in August or September.
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With the likes of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 Super getting discontinued, Nvidia will be making way for a new series of graphics cards built around its new Ampere GPU architecture that will take their place. It looks like the mid-range GeForce RTX 2060 might stick around a little longer, but that card would probably be replaced not long after the high-end Ampere card launch, likely with what will probably be the GeForce RTX 3060.
The Ampere-based next-generation GeForce graphics cards are expected to bring in a hike in overall performance over their predecessors. But they are also predicted to deliver a proper boost in ray-tracing capabilities; that’ll be handy given the PS5 and Xbox Series X have ray-tracing support, which could mean more games with the sophisticated light rendering technique supported. There’s even world that new high-end GeForce cards could even support co-processors dedicated for ray-tracing duties, but this doesn’t seem too likely.
Discontinuing the GeForce 20-series could mean a shortage of current-generation graphics card, meaning retailers wouldn’t need to shift them to get rid of old stock. The knock-on effect of that, according to WCCFtech, is that retailers won’t boost the price of the Ampere cards at launch just to tempt people to buy the older graphics cards instead to clear up their inventory.
As such, when the new GeForce GPUs arrive, they could be priced more competitively at launch than their predecessors. We’ll have to wait a month or so before we find out what will happen and how impressive the new GeForce graphics cards will be.
