A fond farewell to a PC gaming classic | So long and thanks for all the pixels: Nvidia reportedly retiring the GTX brand for good | XFX SPEEDSTER RX 6800 | 16GB GDDR6 | 3840 shaders | 2,190MHz boost | $379.99 at Walmart
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It's all over for one of the most iconic brands in PC gaming: the Nvidia GTX graphics card. Since launching in 2008 with the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280, the GTX brand was synonymous with high performance Nvidia GPUs for a decade. Until the RTX 20-series launched in 2018, literally changing the name of the game. The GTX moniker stuck around for the lower-spec GTX 16-series Turing cards, but now those are being end-of-life'd the GTX brand will be no more.
So, that's it, no more GTX graphics cards to grace our gaming PCs, just RTX from here on out. Well, until the AI completely takes over and makes all traditional graphics rendering entirely obsolete anyway.
Nvidia has stopped producing GPUs based on its Turing architecture. The last of them included the likes of the GTX 1660, 1650 and 1630 series of GPUs. Once remaining stocks sell, they'll be gone and with them the "GTX" brand itself, leaving all Nvidia gaming graphics cards as "RTX" models. Well, with one possible exception, more on which in a moment.
The GTX brand was first used in 2008 as a suffix on the Geforce 9800 GTX. It then morphed into a prefix for selected high-end GPUs with the Geforce 200 series in 2008, such as the Geforce GTX 280.
Over the next few generations, the GTX prefix expanded to cover most of the range. But even right up to and including the GeForce 10 series of 2016, not all models got the "GTX" moniker, with the Geforce GT 1010 and Geforce GT 1030 not being deemed worthy of the final "X".
With the arrival of the RTX 20-series in late 2018, the writing was on the wall for GTX as Nvidia began investing heavily in all things ray-traced. But the GTX brand and pure raster GPUs got a stay of execution in the GTX 16-series, topping out with the GTX 1660 Ti that launched in 2019 as a more value-orientated mainstream line of GPUs.
In a slightly odd twist of fate, it's possible that the "GT" brand will live on past the demise of GTX. Currently, some Geforce GT 1030 cards remain on sale and it's unclear if they will be EOL'ed along with the GTX 16 boards.
Whatever, while this information does not come officially from Nvidia itself, it does seem likely that GTX is dead. Long live RTX, and whatever comes after it. NTX for neural graphics processing, anyone?
This graphic card was launched over three years ago but it's still very potent. It has bags of VRAM on a wide memory bus, backed up with mountains of cache. Makes the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 7700 XT look miserly in comparison.
I've currently got a pair of Spectrum One screens sat on my desk at home, one with this standard glossy coating and the other is the $100 more expensive Gorilla glass version. And, honestly, I don't think it's worth spending the extra as the contrast, colour, and vibrancy of this bright IPS panel is already a big step up over a standard matte coating. The Spectrum One still impresses me every time I boot up my machine, and its peak 750 nit luminance actually makes it a good HDR screen with the extra contrast of the glossy panel. Just don't forget to add a stand if you don't have a spare monitor arm.
Ok, so it's pretty small, and a VA panel. But honestly, for this money and from a well-known and trusted manufacturer, with AMD FreeSync and a 100Hz refresh rate? A pretty good deal if you ask us. This would make an excellent second monitor, or a pretty quick main monitor in a pinch if you're building on a very tight budget.
It's one of the fastest RTX 4070 laptops we've tested but all that performance comes at the cost of excessively loud fans, that not even ANC headphones can block out. The hardware inside deserves far better.
News of the next-generation Intel desktop chips has been relatively quiet of late, but here's hoping we might finally get a proper look at some shiny new silicon.
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