Nvidia has made the decision to stop production on both their RTX 2060 and GTX 1660 GPUs.
Releasing in 2019, both GPUs are comparatively long in the tooth, but also had a unique position in the GPU market.
Specifically, these GPUs released right about the same time that the initial blockchain craze that ate up GPU supplies had already ended. At the same time, they were produced and manufactured just before the pandemic would strike the world, as well as the global economy, and specifically, the GPU market.
The pandemic leading to bad economic conditions, were exacerbated by chip supply issues constraining manufacture and sale of these components. This is even after taking to account that the market would easily transition to online shopping and home delivery. Last year, Nvidia made the dire prediction that GPU supply issues would last through 2022.
Thankfully, including for Nvidia, that prediction was off, as supply issues for both components, as well as the shift to online markets, would be resolved in the coming months. As early as January 2022, we had already started reporting that GPU prices were already starting to go down.
Now, the situation has completely turned around, as the major GPU manufacturers are dealing with the exact opposite kinds of issues. Now there is a glut of supply of new GPUs. Unfortunately for those GPU manufacturers, consumers are not gobbling those newer more powerful GPUS up, as eagerly as they would have before the pandemic.
As we reported last October, Steam data revealed that gamers were buying older GPUs, or holding onto the GPUs that they already had. In fact, the GTX 1660 hit the top 10 rankings of the most used GPUs.
Nvidia does not benefit from the use of these older GPUs, as many of these sold GPUs are older stock. More importantly, they are compromising the sale of newer GPUs, and on this end AMD and Nvidia have somewhat sabotaged themselves.
The newer generation of GPUs are releasing in the middle of the transition to newer CPU socket standards. While the industry would want gamers to be upgrading their computers from the ground up, the pandemic is still creating unfavorable economic conditions. So even now, gamers are cutting corners and saving up, staying to older CPU parts based on older CPU sockets.
In this context, it just makes sense for Nvidia to cut production of their older CPUs. Hopefully, market conditions do improve for everything to normalize.
Source: PCGamesN
