NVIDIA is reportedly pulling the plug on its GTX branding.
Once a mainstay of the graphics card world going forward,
it appears that NVIDIA's products will all be labeled with RTX branding instead.
But why would NVIDIA kill off such strong branding
that commands tons of mindshare in the marketplace?
To understand this, it's helpful to look at some quick history of the GTX brand.
It first popped up all the way back in June of 2005
as part of the G4 7 series. Back then, it was less of a brand
and more of a designation to let people know they were getting a high-end card.
As the first ever GTX card, the G4 7800 GTX,
set users back a princely 600 bucks.
Oh, that hurts. But outperformed all other cards at launch
in demanding games of the time, such as Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2.
Big era for twos. We first saw the more modern G-Force GTX
followed by a number branding with the GTX 260 and 280 released in June, 2008.
And GTX continued to represent the mid-range
to high end of the market all the way through the release of the G-Force 10 series in 2016
with lower-end models getting different designations like GT or GTS.
However, there was a significant shift in branding in 2018.
When NVIDIA unveiled its now familiar RTX branding,
which was created to indicate that a GPU had extra ray tracing hardware built in.
All of NVIDIA's mid-range and high-end cards that used the new Turing architecture
and featured ray tracing became part of the RTX 2000 lineup
while lower-end and mid-range Turing GPUs
that didn't feature ray tracing instead became part of the GTX 1600 stack.
To make it clear that while these cards did have the new generation's architecture,
they didn't have ray tracing or other bells and whistles like DLSS
due to the lack of ray tracing and tensor cores.
But since then, we haven't gotten any GTX cards based on the newer, ampere, or lovelace architectures,
which are RTX only. So why exactly does it seem like NVIDIA
has just given up on producing non-RTX cards?
Although real-time ray tracing was seen as wildly impractical in a consumer graphics card
for a long time, advances in technology enabled NVIDIA
to put ray tracing hardware and AI-focused cores
not just in high-end cards, but also in mid-range models at an accessible price.
The launch price of the RTX 2060 was $349,
and it's possible to get a current-gen RTX 4060
for under 300 bucks. By contrast, the GTX 1660 is going around
for only 190 bucks, only about a $100 delta.
Do we need to call that a delta? Like, we're not talking about physics, you know?
Like, I don't know, okay. About $100 less.
And on top of that, the difference between a GTX 1650
and an RTX 3050 is only about $20
to get a card that's a generation newer and has the additional RTX features.
Seeing as how NVIDIA is using these features as a way to set their GPUs apart from competing products,
it's unsurprising they'd rather have these features all up and down their product stack
rather than split their branding. But in addition to that, it turns out that lower-end GPUs
actually aren't particularly high-margin products.
And it's not like gamers were exactly lining up to buy discrete cards much lower down the product ladder
than, say, a GTX 1650. So it made sense for NVIDIA to incorporate
their much-ballyhooed features into their more value-oriented,
but still viable for gaming products, like the RTX 3050 and RTX 4060,
and just for go having a separate non-RTX product lineup
that didn't really have an obvious place anymore. Although it will take some time for AIB partners
to put the remaining GTX 1600 series GPUs
onto the cards themselves and get them onto the consumer market,
you'll probably see the last ones leaving the factory later in 2024.
Maybe one day, one of the last ever GTX cards
will be worth some money if you keep yours mint in the box.
Can't make any promises, though. But I promise you, I'm so happy that you got here to the end.
Thanks for watching. Hey, like the video if you liked it, dislike the video if you disliked it.
Check out our video on NVIDIA's first ever GPU,
the old ones, and comment below with video suggestions.
Hey, and also I just remembered, don't forget to subscribe and follow.
I'm a little sleepy.