Nvidia has reportedly halted production of the current generation of Turing GeForce graphics cards, suggesting that the GeForce RTX 3080 and its fellow Ampere GPUs may be on the way.

According to Chinese websites ithome and WCCFTech, the majority of high-end GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards have been discontinued and will soon be delisted by major vendors. All of this points in the direction of preparations for the launch of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, likely in August or September.

With the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 Super being discontinued, Nvidia will make way for a new series of graphics cards based on the new Ampere GPU architecture. The mid-range GeForce RTX 2060 may remain a little longer, but this card will be replaced by what will likely be the GeForce RTX 3060 shortly after the high-end Ampere cards are released.

Ampere-based next-generation GeForce graphics cards are expected to bring an overall performance boost over the previous generation, which is handy given that the PS5 and Xbox Series X support ray tracing, sophisticated light rendering technology could mean more games will support it. There is even a world of possibility that new high-end GeForce cards may even support a dedicated co-processor for ray tracing duties, but this is not very likely.

Discontinuation of the GeForce20 series could mean a shortage of current generation graphics cards, which, according to WCCFtech, could result in retailers not raising the price of Ampere cards at launch, tempting customers to buy older graphics cards to clear out their inventory This would be a good thing.

Therefore, when the new GeForce GPUs arrive, their prices at launch may be more competitive than the previous ones. We will have to wait a month or so to find out what happens and how impressive the new GeForce graphics cards will be.