The RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 SUPER have been canned by Nvidia, as the company moves its full weight behind 30-series GPUs. The ongoing shortages of new GPUs and CPUs has plagued the market for months. Per a report by a Overclockers.ru, NVIDIA has “completely stopped” production of both the cards.
The remaining physical stock of finished cards has already been handed off to AIBs or retailers. So if you want to snap up a 20-series card now, you’re going to have to get very lucky. Various outlets are already reporting that stock has sold out in pretty much every e-tailer they can find. And it’s not just the 20-series that are being phased out. NVIDIA’s 16XX series will likely be reduced in 2021, and be gone by the end of next year. That all assumes Nvidia keeps pace with their plan of replacing an old GPU with a new model before ending production, as they did with the 3060/Ti for the 2060 variants.
So what’s going on?
The reason for pulling the older 20-series cards is pretty clear, as Nvidia doesn’t want to waste silicon and semiconductors on future production that isn’t their best offering. The timing is still pretty bad though, and users are likely to be upset. And frankly, there’s not much anyone can do. Nvidia and AMD are both facing down ongoing shortages of various raw materials. A big part of these problems on the GPU side of things is down to reported shortfalls for Samsung in their production of GDDR6 memory.
Reports indicate the memory modules, semiconductors and quality silicon will face ongoing shortages for months, well into 2021. The issue is getting so bad that it’s not just PC gaming that’s affected, as other electronics sectors have to effectively ration material. We could see things get as bad as auto-makers being forced to limit car production if they can’t get enough components for onboard computers.
The biggest reason that a lot of this is happening is two-fold. One set of problems is the production impact from COVID-19 and the Chinese New Year. These two events are going to have a major negative influence on factory output in 2021. Then there’s the added specter of the cryptocurrency boom. AMD and Nvidia are raking in millions selling mining GPUs, which take up precious chips. But that has the net effect of further reducing supply. Add in bots and scalpers pushing up GPU consumer prices, and you have a true nightmare for anyone looking to build a PC.
So while we have to say goodbye to the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 SUPER, we at least get some comparitively priced newer GPUs, assuming any are in stock.
