[In particular, those who tried to find a place to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 would have faced weeks of sold-out inventory. Because of this massive demand for the latest graphics cards, Nvidia has released additional inventory of older GPUs to partner manufacturers in order to get more GeForce GPUs on the shelves.

Nvidia confirmed this move to PCWorld, citing the previous generation RTX 2060 and even older GTX 1050 Ti as GPUs it is offering to board partners. The company said that these GPUs have not officially reached end-of-life status anyway. However, demand is very high, which tells us that Nvidia believes these older cards will still sell.

Of course, demand for the latest GeForce RTX 30 series cards is not simply driven by PC owners who want to upgrade. There is a large and lucrative resale market that takes advantage of retail bots that immediately buy up inventory the moment it goes on sale.

Then there is cryptocurrency mining, which relies on buying up as many powerful GPUs as possible.

It is unlikely that those who are looking to buy the RTX 3080 will settle for the entry-level GTX 1050 Ti instead. However, increasing the supply of desktop GPUs in general could help meet the demand of cryptocurrency miners. Some have even become desperate enough to use RTX 30 series laptops instead. Therefore, the availability of the RTX 2060 wave may cool some of the heat off from the newer models.

Also, not everyone wants or needs the latest hardware. Therefore, the RTX 2060 may find some takers among the less lucrative PC gaming population; the RTX 2060 still supports the ray tracing and DLSS features of the RTX 30 series, including the upcoming RTX 3060.

Nevertheless, the underlying issue of RTX 30 series inventory shortages will not be directly addressed for some time. As retailer Alternate revealed this week, Nvidia is suffering from a shortage of raw materials and chips and simply cannot make RTX 3080 or RTX 3060 Ti GPUs any faster than it currently does.