Nvidia will likely continue making and selling its RTX 30-series graphics cards even after it launches its next-generation "Ada" GPUs. The company's CFO, Colette Kress, suggested as much at Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. PCMag first reported on Kress' comments.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the supply chain issues it exacerbated gave Nvidia an "opportunity" for the gaming side of the business to sell both RTX 30-series and Turing-architecture based RTX 20-series graphics cards, Kress said. "So we’ve been doing that to provide more and more supply to our gamers," Kress said. "And we may see something like that continue in the future. It was successful with Ampere and we'll see as we move forward.”
Nvidia has continued to produce the RTX 2060 alongside RTX 3000 cards and even made a new version with 12GB of memory in December to make more GPUs available during the component shortage, though even that stock was scarce. There's also still the upcoming RTX 2050 mobile solution, which will arrive in the coming months.
Nvidia's next-gen graphics cards, which will presumably be the RTX 40-series, are likely to launch in phases. Typically, Nvidia has launched with its top-end cards and followed up with lower tier variants, sometimes launching 12 months or more later. It wouldn't be surprising to see an RTX 4090, RTX 4080 and perhaps RTX 4070 launch first, with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 sticking around as entry and mid-level cards. That pattern happened as the Turing-based GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 cards stuck around with the new, Ampere-based RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 leading the charge.
In that way, Nvidia has been selling cards from different generations side by side for a long time. It isn't uncommon for any chipmaker to continue to produce older silicon. On the CPU side, for instance, Intel and AMD typically produce older chips for several generations. In this case, though, the cards are being kept around in order to continue to satisfy the needs of gamers who haven't been able to upgrade to the best graphics cards due to the shortages.
"We believe the supply will improve each quarter of this year," Kress said. "And we feel like we'll be in a solid position when we look at the second half of this year."
Still, Kress is suggesting, if not confirming, this strategy will continue, and that keeping old GPUs around may be necessary to keep enough GPUs in the channel so Nvidia can meet demand.
Kress stressed Nvidia was not ready to announce any new products at the investor event, though we "may hear more" about upcoming plans at GTC. The recent Nvidia hack has resulted in a wealth of information about Nvidia's upcoming GPU plans, and all indications are that we'll see Ada and RTX 40-series graphics cards this fall.
