HiGame

There’s been a lot of reporting on the idea that Nvidia is preparing to launch a set of GPUs without ray tracing support over the past few months, including new rumors that broke before Christmas making the same claims. It’s a good time to round them up and look at the possibilities.

As always, rumors and speculation should be taken with a grain of salt. Speculation about rumors and speculation should be taken with several more.

The primary new rumor is from Videocardz, which claims that Nvidia is either preparing to launch a GTX 1160 or possibly a 1660 Ti (Expreview reports 1660 Ti behind a password-locked article, while Videocardz has heard 1160 itself). The rumor is straightforward enough: Nvidia will split the RTX branding into GTX and RTX flavors, with GTX cards lacking ray tracing support. The new GPUs would still be based on the Turing architecture but would carry new model numbers. It is not clear if they would be Turing-class GPUs with the RTX capabilities fused off or whether they’d use entirely different die. It also isn’t clear if Nvidia would maintain a GTX alternative entirely up the stack. Which strategies make the most sense depends on the starting assumptions you make for why Nvidia would do such a thing. One thing we will say is that it probably makes good sense for Nvidia to split the cards by model number and abbreviation rather than just abbreviation. Either “GTX 1160” or “GTX 1660 Ti” is much less likely to be confused with a hypothetical RTX 2060 than a GTX 2060 / RTX 2060 co-branding effort.

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