Nvidia Discontinues Budget GPU’s
Nvidia is phasing out some of their last remaining Turing architecture cards, which also happen to be some of Nvidia’s best price-performance cards. Leaving AMD as the reigning Cost/Performance king when it comes to budget friendly low to mid-range cards.
Nvidia’s Turing architecture was first released in 2018 in their Quatro series of cards and hit the consumer market with the release of the RTX 20 series. This brought real time ray tracing to the consumer market for the first time. Which, at the time, was a long-standing goal of the computing industry. Nvidia achieved this by sectioning off the GPU chip, adding new artificial cores specifically designed to compute real time ray tracing (what Nvidia calls RT cores) and Tensor cores which are dedicated to Artificial intelligence. Tensor cores brought a new technology with it – DLSS. DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling uses AI (artificial intelligence) to sharpen your rendered frames and upscaling the resolution while increasing performance. In 2019 Nvidia released their GTX 16 series cards such as the 1650 and 1660 using this efficient Turing architecture, leaving out the Tensor and RT cores of the RTX 20 series.
The cards facing end-of-life (no longer being manufactured) are reportedly the GeForce GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Super, RTX 2060 and the RTX 2060 Super. Supposedly, Nvidia only had a small amount of inventory left of the GTX 1660 remaining.
So, what does this mean for you, the consumer?
Unfortunately, If you’re a fan of Nvidia these changes only leave the RTX 3050 as a budget friendly option which performs worse than the RTX 2060 and is out performed by the cheaper or equally priced RX 6600 from AMD.
Thousands of user benchmarks across the web show the RX 6600 as faster than the RTX 3050 with 57 and 35 FPS (frames per second) respectively. This would be fine if the RTX 3050 averaged more than 25 FPS at 1440p (2k resolution) with ray tracing on. Essentially the RTX 3050, while having more technical feature than AMD’s offerings, can’t take full advantage of them. This leaves AMD as the obvious option to anyone on a budget
For Nvidia to remain competitive at this price point, they would need to release something like a RTX 3050 Ti variant at the same price as the RTX 3050 or cheaper.
