Farewell, GTX. Nvidia reportedly discontinued the entire GTX 16 lineup

Nvidia logo in black and green

Almost six years after introducing the original RTX graphics cards, Nvidia is fully discontinuing its entry-level GTX 16 lineup, putting an end to graphics cards without hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS support.

The word about the end of the GTX 16 Series arrived from Chinese forums citing Nvidia's roadmap, saying that GTX 16 graphics cards have been "completely discontinued" (via VideoCardz). That means Nvidia is no longer making non-RTX chips for its partners (there are no GTX 16 reference cards).

As a reminder, the GeForce GTX 16 lineup consists of the following models:

GTX 1630
GTX 1650
GTX 1650 with GDDR6 memory
GTX 1660
GTX 1660 SUPER
GTX 1660 Ti

Even though Nvidia stopped making GTX 16 GPUs, you can still find them in various retailers. Still, the stock will not last long, and it is expected to deplete in the next three months. From now on, the cheapest Nvidia graphics card still in the making is the desktop RTX 3050 and the mobile RTX 2050 (this one was never released as a discrete GPU).

Here is the translated post from the Board Channels forums:

According to the NVIDIA GPU product roadmap, the GTX 16 series has been completely discontinued in the first quarter of 2024. Currently, all remaining GPU stock has been allocated to AIC brand manufacturers until their inventories are depleted.

In other words, NVIDIA has officially ceased production of the GTX 16 series GPUs, declaring the historical mission of discontinuing the GTX 1660S, 1660, 1650, and 1630 graphics cards. Going forward, neither NVIDIA nor the core AIC brand manufacturers will supply GTX 16 GPUs to channel partners. It is estimated that the remaining inventory of GTX 16 series in the market will be consumed within the next 1-3 months."

Nvidia launched the first GTX 16 graphics cards in early 2019 as an entry-level series for those who cannot afford notably more expensive RTX models. It offered decent performance upgrades over the preceding GTX 10 series while retaining a relatively affordable price level.