The graphics card shortage crisis continues around the world ever since NVIDIA introduced its new RTX 30-series last year alongside AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series. With high demands and slower production cycles, retailers have been taking advantage of the situation and selling GPUs (new and old) at exuberant costs. On top of that, scalpers and mining farms also made it close to impossible to get your hands on a new GPU.

NVIDIA has now reportedly planned to address the increased demand of its RTX 30-series graphics cards by...releasing stock of its older GPUs to board partners. These include the more affordable GTX 1050 Ti and the mid-range RTX 2060 GPUs. Replying to a query by Brad Chacos, Senior Editor at PCWorld, NVIDIA confirmed, “The products referenced below (GTX 1050 Ti and RTX 2060) were never EOLed [end-of-life]. So ‘reviving’ seems like the wrong terminology to use here. More of an ebb and flow really. We’re just meeting market demand which remains extremely high as you noted.”

NVIDIA currently offers five new GPUs under its new RTX 30-series, including the RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and the mighty powerful RTX 3090. The company had also quietly launched the GTX 1010, an entry-level graphics card based on the old Pascal architecture back from 2016. The chipset on this GPU is the GP108 which is similar to the one seen on the GT 1030 and some GeForce MX-series GPUs made for laptops.

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While it sounds like an interesting plan, NVIDIA’s attempt might cover only a small percentage of the demand. The reason for that is because the newer RTX 30-series offer a generational leap in terms of performance but at the same time consume less power at an attractive price point (at least the actual cost quoted by NVIDIA). So unless one is desperate to have a new GPU in their system, buying one of the older cards means that you remain on older hardware thereby compromising on a variety of new technologies.